Backing up a Linux raid

[divided]

Running Fedora 5

We have a box with a raid 0. There isn't a physical raid card, so it's most likely a software raid. What would be the best way to do a bare metal backup on this machine? Or, would it be easier to un-raid the box and then do a backup?

Thanks in advance.

[scathefire]

you can't just un-raid it to do a backup. what does your file system look like?

df -h

[divided]

thanks for the reply.

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                    108G   34G   68G  34% /
/dev/sda1       99M   16M   79M  17% /boot
tmpfs             218M     0  218M   0% /dev/shm

The BIOS said that it was a raid 0

[scathefire]

i'd use dd, or something like this.
cloning logical volume with dd - LinuxQuestions.org

[divided]

But wouldn't we need to clone it to a raid setup?

[scathefire]

actually maybe you should use Clonezilla

you may or may not have troubles. your system is set up with logical volumes. i've always had trouble in past with backing up/restoring logical volumes.

are you doing like a live migration or what exactly?

[divided]

actually maybe you should use Clonezilla

you may or may not have troubles. your system is set up with logical volumes. i've always had trouble in past with backing up/restoring logical volumes.

are you doing like a live migration or what exactly?

we'd like to do a live migration. Knoppix with G4L didn't work and PartedMagic with G4L would work but would only let us copy one drive at a time - it was seeing two physical disks but should have only been seeing one. We'd like to do a live backup (but ultimately don't have to) but clonezilla doesn't support that currently.

edit: Clonezilla doesn't support software raids

[STanner]

Some motherboards have basic raid capabilities, so it may have hardware raid (if the bios says raid 0, then it probably does). To be sure, check md (run: cat /proc/mdstat ) and LVM setup (run: pvs).

What are you planning to back this up to - another server via local network, external disk drive, cloud storage?

[divided]

Some motherboards have basic raid capabilities, so it may have hardware raid (if the bios says raid 0, then it probably does). To be sure, check md (run: cat /proc/mdstat ) and LVM setup (run: pvs).

What are you planning to back this up to - another server via local network, external disk drive, cloud storage?

/proc/mdstat

Personalities :
unused devices: <none>

is pvs a command? must not be installed and I don't want to necessarily install it with a five-year-old live machine.

I'd like to just back up everything to one external hard drive, but G4L was showing me two 120gb hard drives.

[STanner]

So there's nothing in mdstat, which means no software raid using the multiple device driver.

pvs is part of the LVM2 package, I think you're still running LVM1. How about running: pvdisplay -m? (or maybe without the -m) I'm trying to get the list of disks involved in the LVM / Volume group.
Do you have lshw installed ( run: lshw -class disk -class storage )?