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We are using a dedicated web server with Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 installed, we are using this to host a couple of our websites.

We asked our host to attach an external USB hard drive to our server so we could make a backup copy of our current files and DB data once.

My question is what is the best way to do this? How to copy everything needed in our server to the USB without downtime?

  1. We're thinking of using rsync to copy the files. Is there a bettter way to do this? Faster and more secure (no file corruption and should preserve file meta data)?

  2. For the DB since the websites are live and there are a lot of visitors it would always be changing, rsync would have a problem with this. What is the best way to copy our DB data without down time? DB is ranging from 20GB to 50GB. added: DB used is MySQL Server 5.0.95

  3. Is there anything we shouldn't copy? So far I know that copying:

    • /proc/
    • /tmp/

Is just a waste of time and HD space since we won't be able to use this. Is there anything else like this that I should avoid copying?

This would be a one time copy and we'll have the HD shipped to us after copying everything.

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  • What is your database ? All database has a "backup" command, Backup DB are aware about flushing datas to keep them consistent, anything wrong with it ?
    – krisFR
    Dec 17, 2013 at 21:29
  • DB used is MySQL Server 5.0.95, just use mysqldump to dump the whole 50GB DB all at once? Some tables have millions of rows. This won't put the websites hosted in this server offline? Dec 17, 2013 at 21:32

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