Best Practice for backing up OMV

tkripala · 30. November 2012

FIrst off, I want to thank everyone who has or had a hand in creating OMV. I recently replaced my Windows Home Server with OMV after the motherboard on server died. After replacing the motherboard and CPU, I found that my older version of WHS would not install because of a ton of missing and incompatible drivers and after a day of fighting I gave up trying to get WHS installed. I found OMV and within minutes of starting the installation process, I had the complete server up and running and was able to mount all of my WHS data drives and recover all of my content. I used to have a bunch of problems with WHS accessing the shared directories from all of my other computers, phones and tablets in my home network (due to permissions, user accounts, etc.) that disappeared with OMV. Management of OMV is very simple, intuitive and fast. Not having to worry about viruses is a huge blessing. Overall, this is a really fantastic implementation of a home server and is more than what I was expecting which I would highly recommend over WHS anyday.

Being the paranoid person, I want to ensure that my content and installation of OMV is backed up. All of my data drives are mirrored but my OS partition is on a single SSD. I know that there are a number of utilities and tools for backing up and I wanted to hear from the OMV community what methods and experiences are used to backup the OMV system so that in the event that my SSD dies, I am able to recover my installation.

Thanks!

T.K.

tekkb · 30. November 2012

You want to become familiar with Clonezilla. It will allow you to image your system drive (SSD). Once imaged it can be restored to a new drive with Clonezilla. Then if the new drive has different dimensions and is not identical to old one you will need a program called Parted Magic to resize your system partition to take up the whole drive. There are howto videos for both these programs on YouTube. It is easiest to backup your OMV system drive if you have a monitor, keyboard and mouse attached. You make a boot CD of Clonezilla and in BIOS set to boot from CD. Once you are running the program you can backup image to an attached external USB drive or to a samba share on another server. Other options too but I'm just giving you a basis on how the program functions.

PS- being an old WHS myself I feel your pain. Good Luck!!!!

hari-bo · 4. April 2013

I understand that Clonezilla is used to create a imaged based backup, but then you have to boot a live cd and create the backup, this means downtime.
Is it possible to create a backup with a running OMV server?

ryecoaaron · 4. April 2013

You should only have to create a backup when there is a major configuration change.

hari-bo · 4. April 2013

I understand it, but I want to create a fully scheduled automatic backup and no manually input needed.

ryecoaaron · 4. April 2013

If you config doesn't change, why would you need a scheduled backup?

I guess if you had to have an up to date backup, you could use rsync or cp. You would just need to skip /dev, /sys, and /tmp directories.

hari-bo · 4. April 2013

Zitat von "ryecoaaron"

If you config doesn't change, why would you need a scheduled backup?

I guess if you had to have an up to date backup, you could use rsync or cp. You would just need to skip /dev, /sys, and /tmp directories.

Why? Because it's possible
I fully understand that there are no changes, but i want to create a montly backup of this server to an offsite location without any downtime.

ryecoaaron · 4. April 2013

rsync over ssh would work for that but there are risks that a file in use would not be copied properly corrupting your backup.

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