[mythtv-users] Backup software

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 03:14:31PM -0700, Amy Overmyer (aovermy at yahoo.com) wrote:

> I had a total hard drive failure on one of my mythtv slave backends.
[...]
> Anyway, what I was thinking is since I do have a stack of
> harddrives, if there is software out there that could backup my
> existing linux setup on that slave to another harddrive? I don't
> think any of them are identical in size, so imaging would probably
> not work.

For a one-off backup, if you can connect the two disks and
boot off a 3rd one (or off CD or USB stick or whatever),
dd'ing the entire disk works just fine even if the target
disk is bigger than the source. Extra space in the end will
be wasted but but it hardly matters in your situation.

For longer term, how about setting up RAID1?
Again, disks don't need to be identical, just create partition(s)
that fit on the smallest disk you have.
Then you can keep replacing broken disks with minimal downtime
(whatever it takes to physically replace a disk).

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen