Server disc imaging software

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Hi,

Does anyone have any suggestions/recommendations on disc imaging software suitable for use on a server.

Basically, we had one of our servers completely die on us last week and although we do take nightly backups, it was a pain to set it all up again. If we had an image we could just copy back over that would have made the situation a lot less painful.

We were hoping there is software that will allow us to create a disc image to an external hard drive and also allows for us to use a bootable cd to then restore the image from the hard drive.

Thanks.

 

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We use Acronis at our place.

Disk imaging is great but it wont save you 100% of the time.

We had an issue the other week where the RAID disks had started to fail and the file structure had become corrupt. We chose not to restore the disk image because we would have restored corrupt data. We ended up having to rebuild the server from scratch.

 

Thanks Stoney, that looks like the bit of kit we're looking for.

We had an issue very similar to yours by the sound of things, we're just trying to put better systems in place to cover ourselves in case of problems in the future.

 

What I do for this is keep a record of all installed software packages. With Debian this is dead simple: dpkg -l > installed_software.txt

I then keep a copy of all websites that is up-to-date and just untar it into position. I also keep a tarred copy of /etc and just untar it too. That gives me all content and all settings in two tarred files and a list of all installed software that makes it possible to install the OS and all needed software packages in two iterations. It cuts down rebuild time to something less than 2 hours on machines that are exactly the same as far as hardware goes. If they aren't then I have to change some things like /etc/fstab if the drives are different or any kernel configuration or boot settings, but that's about it.

 

Yes I would love to be able to do that Freddy but unfortunately the server was running Windows!

 

I'm sorry....

 

Cheap shot freddy.

 

My condolences on losing your sense of humor, Nugget. Hopefully you'll find it again sometime soon....