Backing up with CloneZilla without down time

[Ahmed El Gamil]

I was wondering if i can install clonezilla as any other package on a Linux distro and use it to backup the server while it is working instead if interrupting the server by booting the live cd and causing down time ?

Is that possible in clonezilla ?

[nai7]

ahmedelgamil,

Thanks for checking out Clonezilla! It may be possible to install Clonezilla as a package, I've never tried it, but I'm not sure how useful it would be since it can't image a disk/partition that is in use.

As I understand things, neither can Norton's Ghost so, I suspect this has to do with trying to backup something that might be changing. Perhaps if there were some drives in the server which could be unmounted, they could be imaged while the server was up, but that sounds iffy. Eventually, you'd have to image an OS critical drive and would not be able to unmount it.

What kind of server/set up are we talking about?

Anyone else with thoughts?

Alan

[Ahmed El Gamil]

Yup, you are right, 2 points are considered here as you mentioned, the changing data and the mounted file systems.
But actually clonezilla is perfect for cloning machines and backup stuff, so thinking in implementing an idea like that will make an evolution in the project ..

[Steven Shiau]

So far Cloneizlla is using "image-based" tools to save the image, so it's impossible to do so.
Yes, in the future, maybe we will have a solution for this, e.g. use fsarchiver to do so. However, so far fsarchiver does not support stdin/stdout, so it's very difficult for us to implement it in Clonezilla.

Steven.