Clone for Hp-UX

Buy an old server or workstation? I don't see a lot on eBay, but if you could find one locally, I bet a lot of places are like the last place I worked: we threw out a couple of 712 workstations that had been used for testing, and when I left there was still a E55 server sitting unplugged in the corner.

If you back up your data like this and processes are still writing to disk files, you'll risk inconsistencies (files not archived since they were written/changed after the tar run has already completed the directory).

To avoid this, you should make sure that nothing is writing to your disks. To do that in turn, you would need to end all processes having open write handles on your filesystems (lsof /mountpoint | egrep '[0-9]+[wu]' will be of help here) and remount the filesystems read-only (mount -o remount,rw /mountpoint). At this occasion, you might want to run fsck /mountpoint to check fpr filesystem errors. After that, you could simply use dd to make a byte-for-byte clone.

This way you would avoid a reboot, but nontheless you would have downtime for all meaningful services on that server.