I recently installed an Ubuntu Server for home use. As it was my first time doing so, it took a while (and a few reinstalls) to configure everything they way I wanted it. The server install itself is on a small partition on my harddrive.
Is there an easy way to create an image of that partition so if it crashed I could just copy over the image to a new hard drive and boot right up? How do you back up a sever so if it crashes you don't have to reconfigure it?
I'm only concerned with being able to quickly reinstall the OS if it crashes, and not the data on it which is backed up in another location (I found some questions about how to back up user data and data files on this site, just not related specifically to a server's configuration. I'm sorry I missed something and this is a duplicate question!) Hopefully there is a better way than my current meth of just backing up relavent files in /etc/ :). Thanks in advance for your help and input!
UPDATE: I plan on keeping the backups on an external hard hard drives. Sorry I left that out, was tired last night :). Thanks for your help!
Best Answer
You can use FSArchiver to back up an entire partition efficiently. The simplest way is to run it from a LiveCD like SystemRescueCD, but if you partitioned using LVM you can also back up from an LVM snapshot. I recommend against using partimage because partimage backups are not robust to data corruption.