If you accept that disk space is very cheap relative to the cost and hassle of recreating your server environment, you can snap a copy as a virtual machine.

We run all our servers as virtual machines and can back them up while they're running. Copies of the backups can be handed to developers to test changes on what was, until just a day or two ago, the current production system.

Even if you don't run your server as a virtual machine, you can still make a copy of it as a VM.

However, I'm not kidding about requiring a liberal attitude about disk space. The image files are in the tens+ Gb range and sometimes much higher. Keeping track of dozens of copies requires some advance planning.

-- Craig Yellick