Best way to backup entire system?

Hey everyone,
On my windows server, I have a second hard drive attached and nightly it backs the entire drive up as an image to drive 2. That way if I make a bad config change or the drive fails, I restore the image and if anything we’ve lost one day of work.

With Linux I’m not really sure how to do that. I’m running Elastix, and I know it has backup and so on which I guess would help, but for things like system recordings and so on I assume it doesn’t back that up. What’s the best option? I’d like to do the same thing, image the whole hard drive to another drive so if something fails, I can go back and restore it. If anything users may lose a day’s worth of new voicemails. All the programs I’ve used to image the drive though are for Windows so not sure what most people do?

You can look at something like ReaR (sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/).

Hi,

Elastix saves its config in a MySQL database
The current configs are saved in /etc/asterisk, however most will be written over when you tell the MySQL to recreate the configs.
Voicemail and such is saved in /var/spool/asterisk, along with other changable stuff like astdb.

On our systems, without elastix / freepbx, for recovery, we backup our configs, voicemail, custom recordings and astdb file with a script. If we have made any real changes, we run it manually. Takes less than a minute to run.

Should we ever need to recreate a server, we have an autobuild script for Linux and Asterisk, which wgets the backups from a server, unpacks and drops the files into their appropriate spots.

This way, we are not tied to the same piece of hardware.

We typically keep a spare PC with a prebuilt Linux / Asterisk handy and ready to go if we need. Recovery time is less than 30 mins from death to making calls.

Hope this helps
Cheers
Chris