Software that will do an *online* clone of a Linux system

Question

I've currently got a Fedora 21 system that's set up exactly the way I like it. I've had to mess with SELinux a fair bit, and its a pain to get all that redone, so my usual method of cp and reinstall will not quite work.

I'd like to be able to back up my system essentially the same way I back up my Windows systems - I use Veem Endpoint Backup there, but no Linux port is planned.

Essentials:

• Automatic backups on a schedule (Say every day at night or at noon)
• Options for bare metal recovery (So I can fire up a purpose-built liveUSB, point it at my backups and whoot)

• Image-based, or at least maintains SELinux flags and other file attributes (I have a handful of Samba shares I spent entirely too much time setting up).

• doesn't insist on its own volume for backups (as rear does by default)

• runs on my regular install of Fedora 21, and has a maintained release for it.

• is only around as big as the space I have used.

Nice to have:

• a GUI
• incremental backups with automatic pruning of old backups
• Is a package available on standard Fedora or RPM Fusion repos
• I'm able to directly set a SMB share from the UI/command line and it handles mounting it (though I guess I can just permanently mount my backup dir)
• Able to exclude specific directories

Would be sweet

• uses an image file and additional files, and does fancy things with AUFS so I can pick which snapshot I want through a file browser.

Essentially the ideal workflow would be to have a recovery disk of some flavour, a main image of my system, and incremental backups that get pruned at a user-defined point of time.

I don't want a live CD. I want something that's essentially at least the same as every Windows disk image program, only running on Linux. I'm also not really looking for a pure file-level backup.

What I've actually tried?

mondo/mindi: Dosen't recognise my btrfs filesystem, segfaults.

Answer 1

SELinux uses extended attributes, right?

So I think you're right that cp -a / /backup wouldn't work.

nice ionice -c3 rsync --dry-run --one-file-system -aAHX --stats -h /src /dest/

should copy everything you need. (Trailing / or not on the src matters, so make sure your files are going where you want, after starting a copy).

So this should do the trick if you want to do a one-off copy. It's not a full backup solution, but if you want to homebrew something around it, you could.

Answer 2

I've not tried this myself, but yesterday stumbled upon Systemback, which claims to do exactly that:

Systemback makes it easy to create backups of system and users configuration files. In case of problems you can easily restore the previous state of the system. There are extra features like system copying, system installation and Live system creation.

^{(emphasis mine)}

A (currently "partly paywalled") German article on LinuxUser describes this software as "clones the entire running Linux system on the push of a button", and says this is especially useful for switching to a new computer. I know you're on Fedora, so the following might be no "perfect match" – but here's even a Youtube video showing how to "Create System Restore Point In Linux Mint 17".

Not having taken a look at it myself, I cannot vouch for it or offer any personal experience. But from between the lines, it seems to do an "image backup", seems to be suitable to create a "live medium", should be a good choice for your "bare metal" recovery, and more.

For a closer look, there's an English article describing how the entire thing works. From the screenshots, I can even confirm some of your "nice-to-haves": It comes with a GUI, supports multiple "restore points" (not sure if that's done incrementally, though – it rather sounds like "snapshots" as you might know them from virtual machines):

[][6]
^{Screenshot of Systemback (source: Linoxide; click image for larger variant)}

And though I never used it myself, I'm pretty sure that should fit your needs. For more screenshots, head over to the project's pages on Sourceforge.

The only thing which makes me suspicious is: All articles I've found so far refer to Debian or derivates (Ubuntu, Mint) – no references to any RPM based system. So I'm not sure whether it can be applied on Fedora.

Further references:

• SystemBack Is Great Application To Create System Restore Point In Ubuntu/Linux Mint
• Wiederherstellungspunkte unter Linux mit Systemback
• Systemback: Restore Your Linux System To Previous State

As I'm unsure whether Systemback will run on Fedora, let me name a few alternatives:

• Timeshift: explicitly mentions it works on "Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)" – so probably again not for Fedora.
• Remastersys: Again only seems to be Debianized, also development is discontinued.

Answer 3

fsarchiver looks pretty nice. I'm not sure how much incremental-backup support it has, as it looks like it aims to be more of a dumpfs / restorefs. It can do mulithreaded compression; it maps 1-9 to a choice of lzo/gzip/bzip2/lzma with different settings. I think it only compresses file-at-a-time, to be more resilient to corruption, though. (It uses 32bit checksums on every block, and 128bit md5 on every whole file.)

I'm using it to archive my old laptop SSD before doing a destructive firmware update. Works fine so far, will update if the restore process isn't as easy as the dump.

When run, it mounts the block device to /tmp/fsa/. There's another way to run it, for dumping a directory tree, which I guess just works out of the live directory tree. Probably just skips the mount/unmount steps at the start/end. In that mode, it would be like a fancy version of tar or 7-zip, with parallel compression support, and careful archiving of all ACL/xattr/whatevers.

It has no problem dumping a rw-mounted FS, as long as you don't have a problem with the dump of different directories happening at different times. (the docs explain some of the potential pitfalls.)