Clone live system to second disk
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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All,
I've been asked by a company to create a clone of a co-located remote system running CentOS 4.x. That system is located in Virginia and, aside from some minor help from remote staff (e.g. hardware reboot), really isn't touchable. The remote system isn't RAID- or LVM-enabled. It runs an old copy of the Ensim control panel, which is no longer available for Linux, and for which the company no longer has the license scheme. Down time is not an option for this machine.
The remote system is loaded in its entirety on sda. A second, empty, disk (sdb) is also installed. Ideally, the clone would reside on sdb, so that if sda crashed, the system could be booted from sdb.
I've looked at more possible solutions that you can imagine, but end up rejecting them as being unfeasible. For example, I've considered "dd", but that risks creating inconsistent filesystems. I've considered adding software RAID (RAID-1), but that risks data loss.
Others have suggested that I take a look at clonezilla. I know that the live CD won't help me (no down time, and system isn't phsically touchable). Might another version of clonezilla work for me? If so, how do I do this?
Many thanks.
alfred_e_neuman
Hi,
Clonezilla can work only for offline backup, which means the partition must be unmounted so that it can be imaged.
Sorry.
Steven.