Server Disk Cloning Backups

Clone your systems full disk drive at the block level unlike our File Backup which backups up at the file level.

This creates a full clone of a hardrive, including all partitions.

Warning - this is a live mount and the integriy of the backup will depend on server activity.

Due to this reason this backup if offered in Alpha. Ideally DD should only be used on a read only or unmounted drive. dd will copy at the block level of the device so if I file is removed, you could end up with half a file on the device. For some things this would be okay, depending on use case.

Due to been a full device copy the backup is much faster than a file based backup. We found a 25gb DigitalOcean droplet with 15gb used will backup in 9 minutes. Compaired to a file backup of the same server taking x minutes.

Full dumps will not be space efficient, and can be hard to compress, everything on the device is copied and with compression only parts of the device can be compressed. A fresh server will be smaller and as the drive is more used its harder and harder to compress.

Due to the nature of a recovery process you can't do it from a live mounted device, so we don't offer automatic recovery.

Tested at DigitalOcean:

• Make a new Droplet, same size as old droplet (not used disk space, but allocated)
• Change boot to recovery mode, shutdown (not reboot) then boot the server up
• SSH into server
  • run screen
  • type 6 and go to shell
  • Do not mount the filesystem
  • Copy the command from SnapShooter for recovery
  • Paste into terminal and wait
  • run shutdown -h now
  • In DigitalOcean change recovery mode to boot from HDD
  • Open access and check the droplet boots as expected