On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:27:18 -0500, "Chris G." <thoth.serath at gmail.com> said: > isn't there a way to build and ISO image of the current OS using 'cat' > and > filename.iso? i heard that that works though i have never tried it... > yet > > On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 09:33:30AM -0500, James wrote: > > > Currently I am running CentOS 5 on a Dell Poweredge 2400 with 4 18gig > > drives > > > in a raid 5 configuration and 2 9gig drives setup as a mirror. I just > > > purchases 4 36gig drives so my question is if there's a way to move the > > > operating system with a tape backup. Some sort of live recovery process? That is technically possible but the solution is dependent on the type of backup that's needed. The cat > file.iso method makes the backup at the device level since you're basically creating a dump of the device. Assuming that you'll be dumping back to identical hardware on the restore, this method should work. You'll need to create an image of each device that contains data. I haven't tried this with RAID but I don't know why it wouldn't work. Utilities such as tar work at the file system level and are best for backing up specific file systems or directories. The difference is that you'll need to set up the devices and create the file systems prior to restore.