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how can i clone a server onto a remote drive?

I would like to make an identical backup of my CentOS 6 64bit server onto a remote hdd.

I am going to be installing a raid card into the sever causing all data to be erased. I want to be able to backup the server then clone back the data as if the server was never touched.

How can i do this?

I am on a mac and would like to clone the server onto a backup drive, then restore the clone image.

My server has 2 ssds, both 50gb each. in case that information is useful. 1 has the server, the second is empty.

Eli
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2 Answers2

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You can use Clonezilla to backup an image of you system and recover it to another disc provided it is the same size (or more). You can store/recover your images using local disk, ssh, cifs (samba), or NFS.

drcelus
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  • i have read thru the documentations but was left a little confused, do you know of any good tutorials on the subject? – Eli Feb 03 '12 at 07:48
  • Clonezilla has a nice step by step text interface. You will just have to answer a couple of questions to do what you want. – drcelus Feb 03 '12 at 08:54
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The best tool ever to do this based on my experience is G4U.

G4U lets you transfer the image to an FTP server (Single partitions or whole drives) and then lets you retrieve the image and write it to a disk again..

It is included in the Ultimate Boot CD http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ It will definately do your job, the only problem i experienced is that it wont support >2TB disks as it is based on a old kernel FreeBSD.

Of course the raid should be configured before using this tool.

Spiros Souliotis
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  • I had used g4u in the past. The main drawback of it was that it took ages to clone a disk since it did it sector by sector. With Clonezilla only the information was copied. This could have changed at the moment. Moreover, hardware support was not that good (NetBSD based). – drcelus Feb 03 '12 at 08:59