I have a small server set up, and I'm quite new at this, so it took me around two days to get it all up and running the way I want. Now hopefully, I won't have any reason to make any changes to this thing for the foreseeable future, and I can just let it run. The reason I had to do this in the first place is because the last server we had died, and we lost all the configurations for it. So what I'm trying to do is get a semi-regular backup of the entire system, like a disk image type of thing, where recovery should be a straight forward process. The entire system takes up less than 20GB. I have a much bigger local NAS server that we can store the backups on.
I thought there would be a straightforward way to create disk images, but I'm a little lost in all the options. dd looks like overkill, and wouldn't running that once a week be really rough on the ssd drive that I'm copying?
The server has LVM set up, and it looks like making snapshots with this might be the right idea, but I'm still very confused how to do it, and how to turn those snapshots into useable backups stored elsewhere. If the disk is already set up with LVM (I used the defaults for installing Ubuntu server), is it safe for me to start creating logical volumes, or do I need to do a backup before I uh... start making backups? Then once the snapshots are created, I'm unsure how to actually turn that into a backup file, that can be stored elsewhere. My instinct says I can use dd for that, but dd scares me, and I really don't want to screw anything up since the server is running really smoothly now.
If anyone can give me some straightforward instructions how to create a simple backup (hopefully with LVM) of the entire drive (or whatever it takes to be able to quickly restore the machine to exactly the setup I have now) and store it on a server (preferably through samba), it would be very much appreciated.
