[buug] clone a production server

[Rick Moen]

Quoting John de la Garza (john at jjdev.com):

> What would be the best way to make a backup of the entire box as it
> is?  [...]  The box isn't local, but at a data center.

Drive down with your favourite live-CD distribution (Knoppix will do)
and a spare hard drive.   Bring down the server.  Connect the HD.  Boot
the live CD.

Make filesystems on the spare HD to hold the filesystem replicas.  Mount
them.  Mount (read-only) the filesystems from the production drive(s).

Use your choice of file copying tool (I prefer rsync), as detailed here:
"Copying Directory Trees" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Admin/ .

Copying a running system's in-service filesystems is suboptimal.  (Thus
the suggestion of a live CD.)  This averts a number of potential
hazards, including filesytems changing while being copies, copying /proc
accidentally (/proc/kcore's a bitch to copy  ;-)  ), copying other
sub-mounted filesystems accidentally, etc.

And dd's almost never the right tool, in my experience.  

-- 
Cheers,             We write precisely            We say exactly
Rick Moen           Since such is our habit in    How to do a thing or how
rick at linuxmafia.com Talking to machines;          Every detail works.
Excerpt from Prof. Touretzky's decss-haiku.txt @ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/