How do you back up your NTFS partition(s)?

Soldato
Joined
13 Nov 2002
Posts
3,589
I'm interested in reading about people's experiences with backing up and restoring NTFS system partitions using available Linux tools.
 
Always been more reliable than Windows itself for me :D I recovered a failed HDD at my brother's only this week. Windows wouldn't boot, Windows-based recovery tools drew a blank.

10 minutes and a PCLinuxOS live cd later, I'd backed up all the data, reformatted the partition as NTFS and was reinstalling Windows LOL
EDITED TO ADD: That was using ntfs-3g (to have read/write access to NTFS) and QTParted. Once I'd done a proper disc check it turned out the hdd was on a one way ticket to Boot & Nuke but Linux tools recovered it to the point where I could actually use the disc itself and even install on it. The disc's wiped and binned now, but that's not the point lol
 
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I use the dd command to do it. Dd doesn't care about filesystems since it operates at the sector level.

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1
or even
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
 
Add the option bs=10M to increase the speed massively ~50MB/s

dd will also copy blank areas to expect it to take hours on large hdds

sid
 
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