I have been using Linode for a while now and every month or so i take a backup of the current disk image just incase anything goes wrong but it quickly eats up all my spare space and i end up deleting disk images that i may later regret

The ablilty to download/ upload your own disk images would be a very handy feature and it would give us all piece of mind knowing our backups were close at hand if ever needed

What do you think?

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www.StatusChecker.info - Remote service status checker with custom image output and more!

It's reasonably easy enough to do it yourself at the moment - see http://library.linode.com/linode-manage ... e-over-ssh for an example. Of course, "close at hand" depends on where you are transferring the image to (available bandwidth), and how large the image is. I suspect in many cases - aside from a complete loss of the Linode host - a filesystem based backup scheme will be more effective, as well as permitting more selective restores.

Note the library example "pulls" it from the Linode. If you have an ssh server on the target machine, alternatively you could swap things around and do a push.

Also, since the image you want to duplicate is a backup image, you can use your existing Linode OS (rather than a Finnix config) as long as you mount the backup image as a device in your current Linode (I'd suggest marking it read-only in fstab - don't risk changing the filesystem while it's being transferred). So you'll still need a reboot to add it to your profile, but you can continue to operate your normal configuration while the transfer is taking place.

-- David

I do a nightly rsync of my linode (the entire filesystem with various excludes for things like logs, apt cache, etc). I then use local snapshotting to make the backups nightly incremental (ZFS snapshots in my case, I assume LVM would work too).

I've got deduplication and compression enabled on my archive pool too, and a few other servers are all getting backed up at the same time ^_^

Thanks guys i knew you could already download via ssh and ive read a little about rsync but i just thought a function in the control panel to manage disks would be useful

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www.StatusChecker.info - Remote service status checker with custom image output and more!

The control panel can't really give you the option to download disks unless your linode is completely shutdown (what happens if the data changes during transfer... corrupt image). It could also be a large amount of data transfer.

So I'd see such an option as both requiring the image you're transferring to be offline (not attached to a running linode instance) and the transfer to count as part of your monthly transfer allowance. Given that many people probably wouldn't want their linode to be offline for so long you'd probably want to duplicate the image first, which means you'd need that much free disk space as well

It is doable and probably not that much work... but with all the limitations, would it be worth it?

Personally I do a weekly level 0 and daily incremental dumps of my server to a /BACKUP disk, and then nightly rsync those to my home machine. That gives me zero downtime and as much restorability as I need (2 weeks online on the linode itself, as much as I want at home).

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)