Pushed yesterday to GitHub is version 1.2 of Counterpart. It adds a helpful feature that makes it incredibly simple to safely live clone OS X server; optional server & database backup.
During a live disk clone, the Open Directory and PostgreSQL databases utilised by OS X server may not be in a consistent state on the disk. Because of this, the cloned database data may be corrupted, and important Server and services data may not be backed up correctly. Counterpart solves this by providing an option to archive Open Directory & dump PostgreSQL to disk before attempting a clone. Whilst this was possible before with the help of a pre-clone script, adding these features directly in Counterpart has made it easier than ever to implement a cloned backup solution on OS X Server.
More information is available in the Counterpart README, but backing up OS X server data is as simple as throwing the new -b flag as follows:
counterpart -s / -d /Volumes/BootClone -b password
A lot more information on exactly how Counterpart achieves its backups and cloning process is available in the README on GitHub.
