I would like to backup a production server running ubuntu 10.04 LTS on a software raid. In order to to that I have rebooted into a rescue system which is running in RAM.
df -h on ubuntu looks like this:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md2 1016G 5.3G 960G 1% /
none 16G 220K 16G 1% /dev
none 16G 0 16G 0% /dev/shm
none 16G 68K 16G 1% /var/run
none 16G 0 16G 0% /var/lock
none 16G 0 16G 0% /lib/init/rw
/dev/md3 1.7T 274G 1.4T 17% /home
/dev/md1 496M 69M 402M 15% /boot
The thing is, that after booting to rescue the md devices are not present. Instead I do see the 2 harddrives directly:
RAM 32112 MB
Disk /dev/sda: 3000.6 GB (=> 2861 GIB)
Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.6 GB (=> 2861 GIB)
I need to exclude some folders as the backup image would otherwise contain xxx GB of data. So partimage as a backup solution does not work. I am using a regular tar with exclude:
mkdir /mnt/md1_backup/
sudo mount /dev/md1 /mnt/md1_backup/
tar cvzpf test.taz ./ --exclude=test.taz --exclude...
Can I simply mount /dev/sda and run the tar with all the exclude commands? I could imagine, that without the system raid the folders like /home are not present and I also fear that I could even break the system by mounting /dev/sda
How can I proceed from here? My goal is a full system backup without some data dirs.