backing up hard drive

[TheBigAmbulance]

I've been on the prowl for a backup utility that makes an image of either the entire disk, or the partitions of a disk. I would prefer one that does the entire sector by sector image so that the partitions and the MBR are included. I've looked at PING, but I do not see an option in the menus to back up the entire drive. I've tried using dd. But because of my inexperience, my image ends up being HUGE compared to the actual data.

Can anyone point me in the direction of such an app?

[Guest]

Re: backing up hard drive

In the past, I have used partimage. It is nice in that it makes an image of the partition, can compress, and only copies parts of the partition that are actually used. These sites have been good resources for me:

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/partimage

The only thing that I don't like, is the extra install steps from the live cd and the fact that it is for reclaim only, can't really just go in a grab a file here and there.

I also used dd in the past, but it has no advantages over partimage except maybe that it is 'always there' on live cd versions of a distro.

Most recently, I used rsync to copy one partition to another. With a few edits to my grub menu, I was able to boot from it. It used by main part as the root once up, but I'm pretty sure that is because I forgot to update the backup's fstab. I hope to write a sed script that will fix that as part of the backup routine soon. Of course, with this method, you still need a way to rebuild your MBR and partition record in the case of a real (hardware) failure - but much of that can be gleened from the partimage resources. I just recently came to the conclusion that, in that case, I am more likely to just re-install anyway and get a fresh start. Using rsync, I can always boot to my previous state after a bad update (sometimes I experiment with the backport ppa or experimental backport ppa stuff).

I'm still green with this method, so there may be holes in it. Let me know

[russlar]

Re: backing up hard drive

I've been on the prowl for a backup utility that makes an image of either the entire disk, or the partitions of a disk. I would prefer one that does the entire sector by sector image so that the partitions and the MBR are included. I've looked at PING, but I do not see an option in the menus to back up the entire drive. I've tried using dd. But because of my inexperience, my image ends up being HUGE compared to the actual data.

Can anyone point me in the direction of such an app?

I use clonzilla's live cd (clonzilla.org). It's a bootable cd that uses a combination of partimage and dd to create an image of your disk and save that image on another disk. You have the option pass the image through gzip or bzip2 to safe space.