Hello everyone!

My manager just brought to my attention that this organization has a CentOS 6.3 server - he didn’t specify what it’s hosting just yet but asked that I find a solution to do a full backup so that we may restore later onto bare metal with the option to migrate from CentOS to another Linux distro.

Has anyone had experience with backing up / restoring CentOS 6? And if you know what would be the best Linux distro to replace CentOS 6? Or even a step by step guide for both or either one?

Please and thanks in advance!

  • exuAEnglish
    5·
    26 days ago

    Without knowing what was being hosted, the only surefire way would be pulling a complete disk image with cat or dd.

    If you wanted to stay on a similar system, RHEL 9 would be a good option or one of its “as similar as possible” like AlmaLinux.

    Other common distros for servers are Debian, Ubuntu server and Suse SLES/OpenSuse Leap.

    • StaySquared@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      26 days ago

      Yep, that’s the goal. A complete disk image. I’ll do some research on the other distros you’ve recommended. I appreciate it!

      • Morphit @feddit.uk
        1·
        25 days ago

        Is there any reason to keep the existing set-up? If it’s just one drive, you could replace it with another and install Alma or something fresh. Then you could copy over whatever config the old system had to get up and running again. You could swap to the old drive if you needed to revert. If you have a spare machine, you could stand up the fresh setup side-by-side with the old one before swapping over.

        • StaySquared@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          25 days ago

          I have to sit down with my manager to get the full scope of work. I assume we would do a backup of the existing machine as a fallback. Then create another back up that would strictly be data and config to then restore onto a new Linux distro. But that’s purely conjecture at this time.

    • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nlEnglish
      2·
      25 days ago

      Without knowing what was being hosted, the only surefire way would be pulling a complete disk image with cat or dd.

      That’s not surefire, unless you’re doing it offline. If the data is in motion (like a database that’s being updated), you will end up with an inconsistent or corrupt backup.

      Surefire in that case would be something like an lvm snapshot.

      If you wanted to stay on a similar system, RHEL 9 would be a good option or one of its “as similar as possible” like AlmaLinux.

      No love for Rocky?

      Also Oracle Linux is still free, and fully compatible with RHEL.

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
        1·
        25 days ago

        No love here for Rocky or Oracle for that matter.

        Alma is looking better and better all the time ( or RHEL if you can afford it ).

        • DefederateLemmyMl@feddit.nlEnglish
          1·
          25 days ago

          What has Rocky done?

          Also, I 100% understand not liking Oracle as a company, but anyone can use OEL freely without ever having to deal with Oracle the company, and it’s a damn good RHEL substitute.