i need a backup script or software for red hat linux that will mirror the 1st drive to the 2nd drive

I got the cpanel backup but that doesnt help much when you get file system errors have we have recently learned :(

RAID 1

You may want to look at Rsync at http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/

Yep, rsync works great for this kind of backup. You can also use rsync to backup across a network (using ssh).

Frank

Thats what I use from time to time :D

Originally posted by goodness0001
RAID 1

i shoulda added..........we got raid 1

and the bad thing is it mirrors errors and all...so if hard drive 1 goes bad due to filesystem errors, hard drive 2 will be idential with such errors

I have been pointed into the direction of "dd"

The man pages are lacking a bit and I cant seem to find much info on how it would be done. Anyone got any examples of backuping up disk1 to disk2 and then restoring?

great, thanks guys i will look into Rsync as well :)

rsync looks like what i am looking for. Does anyone happen to have an example scripts i can go off of (already seen the ones on their site)

Bascially i got 1 server, 2 hard drives. partions are

/
/boot
/home
/usr
/var
/backup (2nd drive)

Bascially what i am looking at doing is mirroring the first drive to the 2nd drive, and once that intial one is moved over, have a
cron run nightly (or when specified) that will update any modified files from the cron run.

I am looking to have this as a perl script (or whatever) so i can easily port it to all my servers across my network. So that if hard drive 1 fails, i will just need to pop in hard drive two and be up and running within minutes rather then hours (my last outage was pretty major on my /boot partion and if had rysnc setup in the manor i am speaking of, downtime would have went from 8 hours to less then 30 minutes....)

I would also be willing to pay someone for their time in creating such a script (which looks pretty easy, but i am no programmer)

AlaskanWolf,

I'm not 100% sure that you'll just be able to "pop" the second drive in. I have to do a tad of research, but... The Master Boot Record information will be on the 1st drive. It tells Linux how to boot. It's not a "normal" file, so rsync will not backup up that file.

I'm pretty sure you have to use dd to copy that boot information.

More to follow.

Frank

Take a look at rdiff-backup. Like rsync, it can make a complete copy. But in addition it maintains history. So you can restore your data two days ago, instead of the latest data.

Have you ever looked at the "Hard Disk Upgrade" mini-howto on linuxdoc.org?

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html

It explains the gist of our backup system. If drive one fails, we can actually swap drive one and two and reboot.

thanks to everyone on the list, i did subscribe to the rsync mailing list and got quite a few scripts, one of them looks like they will do the job

And yes, your right, i cant just pop in the 2nd drive, but i can rest at night knowing that now i do in fact have a full backup of all the files in case something bad does happen

Dont take my words the wrong way, yes we do nightly / weekly backups but those are mainly key files like fstab and the customers data....with the script i got know, it creates a main backup of all the partitions

thanks adam i will look into that as well :)