Looking for backup software of complete system
David Fletcher
fm_maillists at ntlworld.com
Sat Oct 9 22:40:39 UTC 2004
I'm starting afresh here, because I think this is a different suggestion to
anything else I've seen.
Something I successfully experimented with a few months back, with a dual
booting setup which had only a very small FAT32 partition with Windows 98
installed on it, was using dd to create an image of the Windows partition,
using something like
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=WindowsPartitionImage
Once finished messing around with Windows (and maybe screwing it up in the
process) it's very simple indeed to restore it using
dd if=WindowsPartitionImage of=/dev/hda1
IMHO the big advantage of doing this is that the OS being backed up is not
running i.e. I know that none of the files are changing during the backup
process, therefore a true snapshot is obtained which can be used to restore
the OS to exactly the state it was in when the backup was taken.
To do this with a Linux installation, perhaps it would be possible to use one
of the distributions now available which can boot from a CD or even a USB
flash drive (I've not tried out either of these) and use dd to perform a
complete back up of the Linux installation which is now not running, perhaps
to an external USB connected hard drive.
Hope this provides food for thought to whoever started this thread (was it
Rick?)
And ALWAYS test backup strategies before you need them!
Dave F
More information about the users
mailing list