Creating A Bootable Backup Copy Of System Drive

Question

I'm in charge of a Linux fileserver at my workplace, and since this fileserver holds the company's accounting data, I've got to make sure that there are backups.

Right now, my main solution is based on a couple of external drives (one of which usually lives off-site) and backing up to them with dirvish.

However, I'd like to extend this backup scheme further. On my personal computer, a Mac, I use Super Duper for my backups. It's really nice to have a bootable copy of the system drive such as the one Super Duper creates, that can be 'transparently' swapped in to replace a failing drive.

Is there a parallel utility for Linux - something that can copy the /, /boot, and bootloader combination to produce a bootable copy of a given system?

I'm aware that dd does some of what I want. Some of what I want. If I make a copy of the server's main drive with dd, the copy will have a different UUID than the original, and thus various parts of GRUB and /etc/fstab that identify drives by UUID will fail. That would be sub-optimal.

Solution

There are various backup solutions which provide bootable restore. One of them is Mondo/Mindi - http://www.mondorescue.org/ , another is for example ReaR - http://rear.sourceforge.net/ .

Both of them work and can produce either bootable CD/DVD or PXE image for booting over network. They are their own limitations (LVM/MD combination for example), so you should choose the one which suits you best. And don't forget to actually make a recovery test :)