How do I perform a full system backup? Linux specific external harddrive?

[erinsaurus87]

So heres the skinny,

I have a work laptop set up for me by someone else with software that replicates what is on the server I work with, and while I could most likely replicate that all again, I dont want to have to worry about it. This laptop is an HP and seems to have an overheating issue even though it is less than 6 months old. The side where presumably the fan is or something gets really hot if left on a solid surface for any length of time so I usually try to set the laptop in such a way where the side with the vent is hanging away from any surfaces. I suspect it will not last very long.

Ive only ever used an external hard drive with Macs, and only backed up certain directories. How would I go about backing up everything about my system so that I can have everything be the same on a new laptop if need be? Also I know external harddrives will often say if they are Windows/Mac compatible, does this matter for Linux or will any old external harddrive I pick up at Staples by fine?

Thanks for any help,

Erin

[SteveRiley]

Re: How do I perform a full system backup? Linux specific external harddrive?

I think you're asking how to replicate the internal hard drive to an external drive? If so, this procedure will work. You'll need to first create a bootable Linux live USB (GParted is particularly useful for this exercise). Boot the computer from that and then drop to a command prompt.

1. Run ll /dev/sd* to see what your current drives are. Presumably, you'll see two. The USB drive will be /dev/sda and the internal hard drive will be /dev/sdb.
2. Plug the external drive into a USB port. Don't let it auto-mount.
3. Re-run ll /dev/sd* and note the new drive assignment: probably /dev/sdc.

It's very important that you note the drive assignments correctly, to ensure that you don't inadvertently overwrite existing data. If you have any questions about the procedure so far, write back and let us know what you see when you follow the above.

If you made a bootable GParted live USB, you can verify drive assignments with the graphical gparted utility.

Next, do a byte-for-byte copy of the internal drive to the external drive. Assuming your source and destination drives are the same as in my example:

4. Run sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc bs=16M

dd is powerful but can be dangerous. It asks no "Are you sure?" questions, it does no partition verification; it executes immediately, without warning, and with no status messages. That said, I've followed this procedure several times to make exact copies of drives.

This procedure copies the entire drive, including boot records and partition tables. Your destination drive must be at least as large as your source drive. The bs= parameter reads more data into memory and exercises the caches on your drives more, so it significantly speeds up the copy.

If you want to monitor the progress, open a second command prompt and:

5. Run ps -ef | grep dd. Look for the row containing /bin/dd and then note the process ID, which is the number in the second column (first column of numbers).
6. Run kill -USR1 pid and substitute the process id for pid. The output will appear in the other command window, the one where you ran dd.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: How do I perform a full system backup? Linux specific external harddrive?

This is a second opinion. Please regard it as such; everyone has their own way of doing things, for their own reasons.

1. This may be a little cheesy, but at walmart and other stores you can get a laptop cooler, a small platform with fans in it that assists in cooling the unit. I suspect, though, that you have some process running out of control on it, and if you kill that, it might solve your heating problem. If this is windows, you will need to go into its task manager and see if something is running at 100%. Can't help you on the details there, but it was frequently a problem when I had a laptop with XP, that one process or another would hang and try to fry the cpu.

2. If you are using a gparted live cd (which I recommend), there is an even easier way. Gparted can copy the partition from one device to another for you. The directions for doing so are in Gparted's help menu:

Help > Gparted Manula\\al > Working with partitions > Advanced partition actions > copying and pasting a partition.