Preventing data corruption - cloning
Hi,
The help article at https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/clone-your-linode/ says:
“Before continuing, it’s recommended to power off the Linode you would like to clone to prevent data corruption.”
We're unsure about where this data corruption might occur. On the cloned instance, on the instance being cloned or both? Powering off the node to be cloned would disrupt services so we'd like to avoid this if possible. We're cloning the node so that we can test a PHP version upgrade on the services it runs without putting live services at risk.
Thoughts and suggestions are very welcome.
Thanks
1 Reply
✓ Best Answer
The cloned Linode would be the one most likely to possess data corruption, given that any partly written data, made during the clone, would possibly be corrupted during the transfer.
If you don't want to power the Linode down, here are some suggestions to try and minimize this possibility. Take any services off line, such as database services, or anything that would write data to a disk, off line for the duration of the cloning, or back up anything you may need to recover, such as databases, etc. Don't have any file uploads of any kind occurring during the cloning process. If you have any automatic upgrading of any software or other services, temporarily disable this. Don't upgrade the software while cloning. And finally, force a disk sync before you clone the Linode.
If you take these steps, the clone should boot and there should be no, or minimal data corruption for the clone.