Hello everyone!
My manager just brought to my attention that this organization has a CentOS 6.3 server - he didn’t specify what it’s hosting just yet but asked that I find a solution to do a full backup so that we may restore later onto bare metal with the option to migrate from CentOS to another Linux distro.
Has anyone had experience with backing up / restoring CentOS 6? And if you know what would be the best Linux distro to replace CentOS 6? Or even a step by step guide for both or either one?
Please and thanks in advance!
Wow… that’s nice and clean - straight forward.
Thank you!
Note: do that from a live CD/USB or with the source drive mounted readonly. If you dd a mounted and used filesystem, you’ll most likely end up with a corrupted and useless filesystem on the target.
Nice! Thanks for the tip!
I want to point out that tools like dd or clonezilla will take a copy of the system as-is, in full.
If you want to make it more efficient you may want to look into Borg backups taken in raw mode. It’s similar to what the above tools do, but splits the image into chunks and if you repeat the backup it only stores the chunks that changed.
This means you can take snapshots regularly with minimal storage waste. If you did this with the other tools you’d occupy the full image size each time you do it.
Borg also has remote support over SSH, and can do compression and encryption.
Thank you for the suggestion! I think the goal is to have a system as in image backup. But possibly to also back up the data and configuration to then restore that onto a new Linux distro. This is an assumption of course and I hope that is the case. I think my manager had been falling behind on updates/upgrades/back ups with some of the servers and now coming on board this will be my task(s) to handle.
Backing up just configuration is much simpler and efficient, but it depends greatly on how the system was set up. If you’re just taking over it’s probably safest to just take a disk image, with any of the methods.