Backups on Linux

psychic_teabag

Is remounting the filesystem read-only an option ? An image backup in that state should be fine. Ideally, /var lives on a separate filesystem from the important stuff, so that log files and things can continue to be written.

John_Gray

kwikbreaks wrote: »

Anyhow it's up and running ...

Good!

Unfortunately, I don't think any Linux developer has rewritten VSS for use on Linux, which means that achieving an image backup implies booting from a CD/USB Flash Drive, necessarily offline...

John_Gray

There's an interesting discussion on the Linux disk image matter, from which I extract the sentence:
"Obviously, a [Linux] partition cannot be copied while in use"

psychic_teabag

psychic_teabag wrote: »

What I really ought to do is add a mechanism to record a snapshot of the state of the (debian) packages before each backup, and then in the event of a total system failure, I can just ask for all those packages to be reinstalled during a rebuild.

Looks likes I need
dpkg --get-selections > /etc/apt-selections
prior to a backup, and then
dpkg --set-selections < /etc/apt-selections
as part of recovery, to install all the packages I had previously installed.