Backup
- Thread starter .one.
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To what do you want to back up? DVDs? Internal HDDs? External HDDs? Another machine over the network? Another machine over the Internet? Do you want to back up everything, or just your user files?
I wish to backup my linux installstion like a disk image if you like.
Like acronis true image the eqiv for linux.
- Joined
- 2 Aug 2005
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- 8,721
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- Cleveland, Ohio, USA
Use the dd command as root. The syntax is
dd if=/location/of/disk/to/copy of=/destination/disk/or/file
So to back up your whole system to a file use
sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/one/Desktop/bak-6-Feb-2009.img
Restore it with
sudo dd if=/home/one/Desktop/bak-6-Feb-2009.img of=/dev/sda1
You can compress the resulting image file with gzip or whatever you want assuming the data is easily compressed. Video and audio, for instance, do not compress much.
There are tons of other great ways to do this as well. Rsync is probably better if you're going to do frequent backups to another machine.
dd if=/location/of/disk/to/copy of=/destination/disk/or/file
So to back up your whole system to a file use
sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/one/Desktop/bak-6-Feb-2009.img
Restore it with
sudo dd if=/home/one/Desktop/bak-6-Feb-2009.img of=/dev/sda1
You can compress the resulting image file with gzip or whatever you want assuming the data is easily compressed. Video and audio, for instance, do not compress much.
There are tons of other great ways to do this as well. Rsync is probably better if you're going to do frequent backups to another machine.
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Rsync has come on a lot these days. I hadn't looked at it for a long time (5yrs+), but I've just rewritten the backup script at work using Rsync instead of what was previously used (dump) and we now have weekly full and daily incremental backups to removable disk along with a weeks worth of local snapshots (1 daily and 5 hourly) for instant file recovery without requiring the backup media to be used for the restore. It's not a bare-metal-restore option by any means, but I don't need that level of recovery and it works really good in the environment that my company uses (code repositories, homedir's etc) and it's very quick.
The only real problem with rsync diff backups is they increase the time and memory requirement to fsck an ext3 partition.
It works ok though apart from that.
I've been experimenting with tar -g. Some interesting moves you can do there.
It works ok though apart from that.
I've been experimenting with tar -g. Some interesting moves you can do there.