Imaging a running Linux server

[Chris O'Connell]

Thanks, I'll check out Dump.  My preliminary reading indicates that Dump
doesn't work with Ext4, is that correct?



On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Edward Ned Harvey <blu-Z8efaSeK1ezqlBn2x/YWAg at public.gmane.org>wrote:

> > From: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org [mailto:discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org] On
> > Behalf Of Chris O'Connell
> >
> > I usually use Clonezilla for my imaging needs.  Sadly, Clonezilla is
> > having
> > some trouble with the hardware on one of my servers.  Ideally I
> > wouldn't
> > want to take my server down to image it anyways.
> >
> > Can anyone recommend a tool to image a system while the system is up
> > and
> > running?
>
> Dump.
>
> I am aware of the downsides of dump.  Running it on a mounted filesystem,
> there's no guarantee it can capture everything or maintain consistency
> because the disk is changing, and things are buffered and being written to
> disk which are still only in ram.  The same problem applies to all backup
> tools that you can possibly use on ext fs.  If you can unmount, dump is
> your
> best tool.  If you can't unmount, dump is still your best tool (unless you
> want to exclude things, or do some other feature that dump can't do.)
>
> This will all change one day, when BTRFS becomes stable.
>
> Or just serve everything from a solaris NFS file server with ZFS, and the
> whole thing becomes a non-issue.  ;-)
>
>