From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Dec 2 14:28:21 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from blackhelicopters.org (geburah.blackhelicopters.org [209.69.178.18]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id F38F014BD7 for ; Thu, 2 Dec 1999 14:28:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org) Received: (from mwlucas@localhost) by blackhelicopters.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id RAA38934 for questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 2 Dec 1999 17:27:40 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from mwlucas) From: Michael Lucas Message-Id: <199912022227.RAA38934@blackhelicopters.org> Subject: backup to live system? To: questions@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 2 Dec 1999 17:27:40 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL43 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, A client has a 3-stable machine on the exposed Internet that is providing vital services for his company. It's a private T1, private Ethernet, but moderately visible. We have tape backups, but it would still take a while to rebuild this machine. There would be fairly heavy costs associated with downtime. The OS is rock-stable, but it's still fair-to-middlin x86 hardware. We're considering having this machine back itself up every night to another machine on the same network, essentially making a cold-swappable backup. We'd copy /home to /home, /etc to /etc2, and so on for all the vital system files. This way, if machine 1 starts smoking we move /etc/rc, reboot, and boom! we're back up. Would anyone out there care to share their experiences and methods of doing this? I can think of a couple methods off the top of my head, but I'd prefer to learn from others' mistakes. ;) Thanks, Michael To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message