I am upgrading Hard Drives and have faile at every attempt to use the R1soft restore so option down to putting in new drive with a fresh OS reload.
My question is whatis the best method to restore everything from my current 80GB drive. Server is running cpanel. I know I would not want /dev and /proc from the old drive.

How would you restore using the origional primary drive as the secondary drive? the new drive is 250 vs the 80 for the old drive and the partition sizes will all be larger.

can I bump this to see if anyone has an answer?

Well, I am not familiar with cpanel (only PLESK and some HELM), but at LEAST you can "tar" the user data and untar it at the other end. Does cpanel have a "backup/restore" utility, per site, or entire server? I know Plesk does. I used plesk's own backup, but not trusting it, I had tarred all the user data as well. -t

I will have the origional drive in as seconday so I could copy everything over, just want to get all the cPanel, apache users etc without wiping out the drive since they or doing a OS reload.

To be safe, I would backup the whole system and do the plesk backups separately. You should be able to restore using the plesk backups safely enough, but the whole system backups are good to have if you have to restore anything not specific to plesk.

What was the problem with using R1Soft CDP? If you had backed up your server to a CDP Server then restoring should be quick and very easy. You just run a bare metal restore by booting the new server into the Live Boot mode (ask support to do this, the server doesn't even need an OS installed).

Good luck.

Also, using this method of backing up and restoring will require a good bit of downtime. At least while you're booted into the livecd and restoring.

I'm also curious why the R1soft backup didn't provide a quick way to accomplish this task?

I thought one of the big advantages was being able to do a bare-metal restore in case of drive failure, etc.


It seems like it would be faster to do a bare metal restore than having to reload the os, then restore or reconfigure all customizations and hardening, and then finally reload all customer data... shouldn't the bare metal restore be pretty quick?

I was hoping the R1soft solution would provide a fast complete backup & restore similar to what I get on my local office systems using TrueImage software to clone disks... is it because R1soft doesn't handle partition resizing to upgrade disk sizes in this case?

In the case of a normal backup/recovery scenario, you are correct. It wouldn't take nearly as long because you would be restoring to the same machine from which you created the backups. In this particular case, it was being used in more of a migration scenario (trying to replace one size drive with another), where the partitions and filesystem sizes are different. Its mostly the resizing of the partitions/filesystems that would require the downtime that I was referring to. This is not necessarily a fast process for an ext3 filesystem and it can't be done on a live filesystem. If thats the method that was used anyway, these are the main issues that would have to be dealt with.

I was wondering how the R1soft backup tolerates slightly different hardware, e.g. if you went from a 10k drive to a 15k drive that was slightly different in size, or if you wanted to expand from a 73 to a 146 GB drive for example. I've not used it before, but I happened to use the $49 home version of Acronis True Image to clone a home system when the 15k scsi drive failed, and found it remarkable how easy and fast (<15 minutes) it was to clone the os drive and resize to fit the partition to the new drive. I was hoping that R1soft would handle an os drive swap on a server equally easily on a server here. I suppose though that going over the network at 100 mbps it would take a lot longer than on a local system where I can hit the limit of the drives at ~600 mbps (75 Mbps) while cloning.