Disk image with rsync/rsnapshot

[Henri Shustak]

> I want to make a full disk image backup of my disk with rsnapshot/rsync that I can restore on a new disk.
> Part of my /etc/rsnapshot.conf looks like follows:
> 
> exclude   /proc
> exclude   lost+found
> exclude   /media
> exclude   /sys
> exclude   /dev
> exclude   /tmp
> exclude   /dev
> 
> 
> backup    /   localhost/
> 
> My questions are ... can I use the backup and copy everything from localhost/hourly.0 ---> / of my new disk and is it bootable ?

One thing to keep in mind is that backing up a computer system when it is running may cause issues. For example, if you backup the files of a running database (eg. MySQL) on a computer system, by backing up the files (which the database uses stores information within) by backing up the computers file system, then upon a restore of these files, the database may be in an inconsistent state. One reason for this is because some data may not have been flushed to these files within the file system. However, there other potential issues as well.

One option in the above scenario, would be to shutdown the data base during the backup. If this is a possibility. Another would be to perform a database dump. Then upon a restore to load the dump back back into the database as part of the restore process (eg. load the dump back into MySQL). Yet another approach would be to have a mirror of the database on a separate system and perform the dump on this separate system. There are other approaches as well.

Above is one example of potential issues. For a full bootable system backup. You may want to have a look at the Clonezilla project : http://clonezilla.org/

If it is possible to, shutdown the machine and then perform the backup with a tool like Clonezilla this will keep your backup and restore process very simple.

Hope this helps.

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