[ale] Clone live system?

[Raj Wurttemberg]

Now that COVID is slowly going away, some of our customers are now looking
to do some OS upgrades, mostly RHEL 6 to RHEL 8 and SuSE 12 to SuSE 15.  We
have been using Relax and Recover (ReaR) (
https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2115051) which dumps the live system to
a bootable ISO. No outage is required.

We take the ISO, boot it on a temp server, upgrade the OS there and on
upgrade day, reverse the process on the day that we get an outage from the
customer. The ReaR process works ok, but if any of the file systems are
separated like /usr, or, /var, etc...  like you would normally find on a
system, ReaR runs into difficulties.

I did some Google-ing for other tools that can create a live clone of a
server. I did find two tools that look promising...

- doClone : http://doclone.nongnu.org/
- MondoRescue : http://www.mondorescue.org/

Besides 'dd' I was curious what live cloning software you all have tried.

/Raj W.
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