New to Linux: Best practices for system cloning/imaging for disaster/backup recovery

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In the next year we are migrating our system from a Windows system to a Linux system with all RHEL machines (desktops & servers).

 

I am in the process of learning linux and one of my tasks is to create system clones/images in case of a disaster or installing new machines so we all have one standard for each machine.

 

 

I have research some different softwares for example clonezilla seems to be the most popular.

I tested sysrescucd with PartImage but that doesn't support Ext4.

 

In testing clonezilla it seems to work fine but when I boot up the machine that I just recently but the new clone on...it makes me enter in the encryption password through a command line rather than through the simple gui that RHEL supplies on my desktop that I used to clone.

 

I am not sure if there are softwares out there that you can pay for that are better than others.

 

Just want to get some opinions on what the best softwares are out there for me to use.

 

Clonezilla seems to work fine but its just when I putt the clone image on the new machine the boot up seems different and it shows a lot of command line data when booting up rather than showing the rhel loading image.

 

Also clonezilla seems to take a long time to get the image and to upload the image (like an hour and half for each) and I don't have much data on the imaged machine.

 

Hopefully all of this makes sense it was just a bunch of rambled stuff I put together quick.

 

Thanks.

Responses

Phil,

 

Since it sounds like at least part of your hard drives are encrypted any drive copy utility is going to have to do a sector by sector copy of the encrypted data since none of the information can be read by the program.

 

This is going to take some time when either creating a backup or deploying one.  Essentially the size of your image is going to be the exact size of the drive being copied.

 

One trick I have done is to fill the free space of the hard drive with zeros prior to imaging, but that only works for unencrypted partitions.

 

Another program you could look at would be Acronis, which can handle both LVM's and EXT4 file systems.

 

-Vince

Has anyone successfully deployed/made use of Duplicity for backup/restores on RHEL (6)? Developing a backup/restore strategy here as a new RHEL user as well (and do note the presence/potential for AMANDA and Bacula as packages currently installed/available). I've used duplicity + Deja-Dup gui (plays perfectly in GNOME, Nautilus) on other linux installs (Ubuntu primarily) and like the ease of use for secure automation and direct portability of backups to AWS, Rackspace Cloud Files, etc. Just curious if others have attempted this in RHEL6 (as duplicity is packaged in EPEL?).

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