CentOS 6 Full Backup Software?

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Hi All ;)

I need a good tool to backup whole system on block level rather than file level and easy to use. I currently need to backup to an USB disc (50+ GB of data) a system and then reinstall it. In the future if needed I will revert to the system from backup ;)

What can you recommend?

BR, Rafal.

9 thoughts on - CentOS 6 Full Backup Software?

  • For ext2/3/4, use dumpe2fs, for xfs, use xfsdump

    phew, 50GB+ to a USB stick is gonna take *hours*, they aren’t known for speed.

    —
    john r pierce 37N 122W
    somewhere on the middle of the left coast

  • If you use dump you’ll have to create partitions/filesystems before the restore and reinstall grub yourself. Clonezilla will do that for you. The ‘rear’ package from EPEL would also likely work although it uses tar for the backup at least by default.

    —
    Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@gmail.com

  • Rafał Radecki wrote:

    Do you really mean block level? Are you wanting something like a dedup?
    Why do you *not* want file level?

    mark

  • ‘dd’. I use it routinely when doing p2v migrations of older hardware and when migrating heavily customized systems between hardware.

    Which brings up the point maybe you might want to investigate virtualization options if you strongly suspect you’ll have a requirement to revert via a bare metal restoration procecure.

  • I am making backup of the mentioned machine because I need to install a virtualization software on the same hardware. I think that I will use containers with cgroups this time, usually I use kvm, so it will be somewhat faster and I will be able to get some experience with LXC (untill now I used OpenVZ and am not a fan of it ;) ).

    Overall thanks for all help, I will use CloneZilla :)

    Have a nice day!

    R.

    2014-07-16 22:54 GMT+02:00 Brian Miller :

    CentOS mailing list CentOS@CentOS.org http://lists.CentOS.org/mailman/listinfo/CentOS

  • The ‘rear’ (Relax-and-Recover) package from EPEL is about as easy to use but with a different approach. It will generate a bootable iso containing a script to reconstruct the partitions, filesystems, etc. and restore to them. Some tradeoffs are that Clonezilla will do single disks and bring along windows or other partitions not part of the active system, but can’t handle multiple drives or RAID and it needs at least an equal-sized disk for the restore. ReaR can make its backup without shutting the running system down, understands raid/lvm, etc., but only the linux filesystems – and with some work you can modify the disk layout/sizes before the restore. ReaR is a reasonable tool to do conversions to VM’s, etc., where you are likely to want to rearrange the layout or remove software raid, although you have to manually edit the layout description file.

    —
    Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell@gmail.com