Thanks for both answers so far. Plenty of ideas there, but in my limited understanding not a solution yet in the way I need it. Perhaps I should describe the position of the server. It's in a cupboard under the stairs and so not exactly inaccessible, but not easy to get at and I certainly don't want to have to drag it out and attach a monitor every time I want to re-clone which is what I assume would be required if I needed to boot off a separate USB for instance.
So in 'pseudo-code' I would like to make a new bootable disk in a 250G partition on the spare disk (perhaps leaving it completely empty?) and then regularly and remotely running as root do something equivalent to:
so that every single file and permission on the current system is cloned onto the new disk partition. One nice thing about this is that after the initial big copy it would be incremental. Perhaps the qemu-utils mentioned could be part of this process, I will investigate. I suspect that cloning a running system may have some drawbacks or wrinkles but if they were simple to fix (perhaps a separate fixup script) I could live with that.
If the SSD ever fails I'm happy to drag it out from the cupboard, attach a keyboard and monitor and do whatever is needed on the new partition to make it boot from there instead.
So in 'pseudo-code' I would like to make a new bootable disk in a 250G partition on the spare disk (perhaps leaving it completely empty?) and then regularly and remotely running as root do something equivalent to:
Code:
rsync -a /* /dev/sdb?/If the SSD ever fails I'm happy to drag it out from the cupboard, attach a keyboard and monitor and do whatever is needed on the new partition to make it boot from there instead.
Statistics: Posted by hopster — 2024-04-07 09:28