November 26th, 2007

Cloning Slices and Named Backups

No turkey-day hang-overs at Slicehost. Jared and I have added a couple of new (and oft requested) features over the holiday weekend.

Named Backups

We’ve reworked the backups a bit based on a lot of good feedback. The backup service will now consist of three backup “slots”. If you want daily/weekly scheduled backups those will occupy two of the available slots, leaving a third spot for a backup of your choosing. If you would prefer to not have a daily or weekly, you could opt for additional named backups.

Building New Slices From Backups (AKA cloning)

So let’s say you’ve saved a named backup called “my perfect slice” and would like to be able to crank out a couple of brand new slices based on that image. In the “system image” drop-down on the Add Slice page you’ll notice that you now have an option to select any backups of your other slices for creating new slices. It’s as simple as that. Note that the root password, network configs, and ssh host keys will be regenerated for each install based on a backup.

Posted by jason Filed in

13 Comments

  1. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM stubblechin

    Awesome! OK, I might have to start using Slicehost’s backup now instead of jury-rigging my own.

  2. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Don

    Clone sounds killer. Useful, and pretty awesome from a technical standpoint.

  3. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Francesc

    Yay!! Now Slicehost definitely stole my heart.

  4. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM MIchaelT

    Swoot swoot!

  5. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Hawkeye

    Send in the clones.

    This is great news. Really solves some questions we were having about how to effectively deploy on Slicehost.

  6. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM velshin

    I love you slicehost engineers, thanks so much for this feature!!!

  7. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM adam

    Cowabunga!

  8. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM DavidK

    is there any way to download one of my slices and run them locally in say vmware player so I can tinker with them?

  9. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM SuperJared

    David, sorry but we don’t make the images available to download.

  10. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM chrisfarms

    thank you soooooo muchhhh!

  11. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Luke

    Bring on the clones!

  12. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM ej

    clones make me so happy, you have no idea.

    thank you!

  13. March 17th, 2008 at 10:01 PM Ali Ebrahim

    Thanks. It’s also good that I can disable daily backups but keep weekly backups enabled. On a day-to-day basis there are very few updates on my slice that would make having daily backups worthwhile.

    This way I still can keep the weekly backups going and keep two snapshots rather than one.

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