Hello everyone!

My manager just brought to my attention that this organization has a CentOS 6.3 server - he didn’t specify what it’s hosting just yet but asked that I find a solution to do a full backup so that we may restore later onto bare metal with the option to migrate from CentOS to another Linux distro.

Has anyone had experience with backing up / restoring CentOS 6? And if you know what would be the best Linux distro to replace CentOS 6? Or even a step by step guide for both or either one?

Please and thanks in advance!

  • Bell@lemmy.world
    9·
    4 months ago

    I have a CentOS 6.8 server that I backup with:

    dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=sync,noerror bs=4M

    Of course change the sda/sdb to whatever your source(backup drives are

  • exu@feditown.comEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    Without knowing what was being hosted, the only surefire way would be pulling a complete disk image with cat or dd.

    If you wanted to stay on a similar system, RHEL 9 would be a good option or one of its “as similar as possible” like AlmaLinux.

    Other common distros for servers are Debian, Ubuntu server and Suse SLES/OpenSuse Leap.

    • StaySquared@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      4 months ago

      Yep, that’s the goal. A complete disk image. I’ll do some research on the other distros you’ve recommended. I appreciate it!

      • Morphit @feddit.uk
        1·
        4 months ago

        Is there any reason to keep the existing set-up? If it’s just one drive, you could replace it with another and install Alma or something fresh. Then you could copy over whatever config the old system had to get up and running again. You could swap to the old drive if you needed to revert. If you have a spare machine, you could stand up the fresh setup side-by-side with the old one before swapping over.

        • StaySquared@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          4 months ago

          I have to sit down with my manager to get the full scope of work. I assume we would do a backup of the existing machine as a fallback. Then create another back up that would strictly be data and config to then restore onto a new Linux distro. But that’s purely conjecture at this time.

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    For backup and restore :

    To move from CentOS to sometimes very similar look at Rocky Linux or Alma Linux. There may even be seamless migration methods for it.

  • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
    3·
    4 months ago

    Any reason you can’t just do your normal backups? Should be easy enough to do an rsync if you don’t have a backup solution

    • StaySquared@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      4 months ago

      I just barely joined the organization, so I’m not entirely sure what’s in our environment/infrastructure. First task given to me is to find a full image back up solution. My assumption is that we wants to move off of CentOS for obvious reasons and move onto a new Linux distro. I haven’t spoken with my manager just yet to get a better idea as to what the end game is. Hopefully today I’ll get the full scope. I can’t imagine we’d want to continue using CentOS.