HI All, So I have 5 1U servers (running Windows) that have Ultra 320 SCSI Drives in them. The owner of these boxes wants the drives captured in their current states to .iso or .cdr or something where if the need arises the data can be viewed, used again, etc. So what is the best approach? Boot from a Live CD, hook up a USB external HD and do what? Can I create a .iso or .cdr (or some other portable format) and have it created on the external USB? Thoughts on this process would be appreciated. -ML
ML wrote:> HI All, > > So I have 5 1U servers (running Windows) that have Ultra 320 SCSI > Drives in them. > > The owner of these boxes wants the drives captured in their current > states to .iso or .cdr or something where if the need arises the data > can be viewed, used again, etc. > > So what is the best approach? Boot from a Live CD, hook up a USB > external HD and do what? Can I create a .iso or .cdr (or some other > portable format) and have it created on the external USB? > > Thoughts on this process would be appreciated.A simple way would be to download/burn a clonezilla-live iso, boot the servers with it and do a disk->image copy. If you have some other machine on the network with sufficient space, it will let you connect via nfs, ssh, or to a windows share - or it should hand a locally connected usb drive if you are careful about picking the source and destination. It understands most filesystems well enough to only copy the used space and you can reverse the process to restore. I don't believe there is a way to view the file content in the stored image format, though, so you would have to restore to a similar drive/machine if you need that. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
ML wrote:> HI All, > > So I have 5 1U servers (running Windows) that have Ultra 320 SCSI > Drives in them. > > The owner of these boxes wants the drives captured in their current > states to .iso or .cdr or something where if the need arises the data > can be viewed, used again, etc. > > So what is the best approach? Boot from a Live CD, hook up a USB > external HD and do what? Can I create a .iso or .cdr (or some other > portable format) and have it created on the external USB? > > Thoughts on this process would be appreciated. >if they are windows servers, I think I'd use a windows tool to backup a file system level image of the disks, perhaps from a live CD (bartPE, UBCD4Win), or by temporarily installing the drives onto another Windows system. however, this gets quite complicated if they are using any sort of raid. Using DVD-ROM as the backup media will only hold 4.3 or 8.4(?) GB of data per disk, is that adequate? The alternative is a USB external HD, as you indicated. I think I'd use Windows NTBACKUP if you don't have Acronis TrueImage or other backup software.
ML wrote:> HI All, > > So I have 5 1U servers (running Windows) that have Ultra 320 SCSI > Drives in them. > > The owner of these boxes wants the drives captured in their current > states to .iso or .cdr or something where if the need arises the data > can be viewed, used again, etc. > > So what is the best approach? Boot from a Live CD, hook up a USB > external HD and do what? Can I create a .iso or .cdr (or some other > portable format) and have it created on the external USB? > > Thoughts on this process would be appreciated. > > -ML >Hello I'd use an external hard drive and use ntfsclone or partimage to make an image. You do have to take the server offline though, if someone has suggestions for tools that can do this while windows is running, that'd be awesome. Glenn
>-----Original Message----- >From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] OnBehalf>Of ML >Sent: Friday, October 02, 2009 9:46 PM >To: CentOS mailing list >Subject: [CentOS] [Slightly OT] Data Preservation > >HI All, > >So I have 5 1U servers (running Windows) that have Ultra 320 SCSI >Drives in them. > >The owner of these boxes wants the drives captured in their current >states to .iso or .cdr or something where if the need arises the data >can be viewed, used again, etc. > >So what is the best approach? Boot from a Live CD, hook up a USB >external HD and do what? Can I create a .iso or .cdr (or some other >portable format) and have it created on the external USB? > >Thoughts on this process would be appreciated.Others have already suggested Clonezilla och g4u. In either case, it might be a good idea to run the perl-applet "win-preclone" (requires ActivePerl) on the servers. This applet will fill all empty hd-space on the servers with zeroes, significantly decreasing the resulting gz-file you'll get from either Clonezilla or g4u. Neither of the clone tools mentioned will keep the servers online and available for external use while the cloning is in progress. You might want to check up on this with the owner, if the servers are mission-critical, or something to that effect. Over here, a clone from a WinXP-box (with Office and bunch of other standard apps we deploy) residing on a 40GB hd will result in a 8GB-file. After running the win-preclone perl script on it, it will be about 2GB. Just to give you an idea. Make sure you have space enough on the ftp-server, you're cloning to. HTH. -- /Sorin -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 5106 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20091005/52e34746/attachment-0002.bin>