Hello,

I've been quiet for some months, but I've been trying to read the 
messages in the way I can.

Now I am running to the list to ask a question that has been discussed 
here some time before (maybe many times), but I could not find a 
solution that fits exactly on my needs, maybe I wasn't able to identify 
it...

Let me tell you the full story...

I have a backuppc server with 3 250GB Sata disks running in Software 
RAID-5 with LVM built on top of it. This systems is been running for 
quite some time now. This server is in a different building from where 
we have most of our computers and our servers. But now we got a little 
more paranoid, so we want to backup the backuppc server, and take it 
home. We want to do this process at least once a month, by now we don't 
believe that we need a greater frequency.

So, I bought an USB external drive with 500GB and now I am thinking 
about what is the best way to do it.

My first attempt is to dd each partition of the backuppc server and save 
it as files on the usb disk. This seems to be a simple solution and 
maybe it is good enough. But I was wondering if it wouldn't be possible 
to dd the entire installation, and have a sort of "LiveHD". That would 
be really good and easy to use in case of panic.

My installation looks like this:

/dev/mapper/vg-root on / type reiserfs (rw)
/dev/md0 on /boot type reiserfs (rw,notail)
/dev/mapper/vg-backup on /var/lib/backuppc type reiserfs (rw)

I am thinking about creating 3 partitions on the usb hard drive and to 
dd each of this disks to its corresponding partition. I guess that this 
could work, but I see that there will be some issues:
   * After dd I will have to mount the usb system and adjust fstab
   * I will have to boot on the system on a liveCD to do this, or I will 
have to remount the root system as read-only to run dd
   * install grub on the usb disk (never did this...). maybe some 
adjustments on menu.lst will be needed.
   * don't know if I can boot the usb drive directly on any computer ( I 
guess that this is not a problem since I can get a "not old" computer)

What do you think of this? Does it seems to be reasonable?

Thanks for any comments or help,
Rodrigo

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