[lug] Backup to 2nd HD with dd & rsync?

[Phil Rasch]

I was really impressed by the rsync HOWTO refered to in an earlier
post. I am going to try putting together that kind of thing up for machines on
my home network.

If you want another pretty good tool high level tool to backup and restore
partitions then I have been really happy with partition image
<http://www.partimage.org/>. You can control it either at the command
line, or through a text based GUI. The commands are intuitive, it
happily deals with variations on filesystems (ext3, reiserfs, etc), it
has compression tools built in, it skips unused portions of the
disk during backup for speed and to save space. Partitions can be save
across the network using a server/client paradigm. It has an active
development group, and it is GPL'd. 

It comes as a standard tool on the KNOPPIX distribution, which also
deserves a plug. 

I initially was dropping a KNOPPIX CD-ROM into the drive, letting it
boot KNOPPIX with the hard drive(s) filesystems (both EIDE and SCSI)
mounted read-only, and backing up the all filesystems (including the
VFAT filesystems of my families two M$ machines) to an external hard
drive using partimage. I would just carry the CD-ROM and the external
drive from box to box, backing up as I went. No fussing with M$ backup
tools, no SAMBA, no NFS, just a little script I kept on the external
drive that remembers which partitions go with which box. It isnt a
perfect solution. There are no incremental backup capabilities, and
doing it over and over again is boring and tiresome, so I am not
advocating it for a methodology for the long run, but it was pretty
good for some short term piece of mind.

As an aside, I will extend the KNOPPIX (which is a Debian variant)
plug. It has the best on the fly hardware recognition that I have ever
seen in a linux or BSD distribution. It boots up to X from the CD in
about a minute recognizing every bit of hardware on 5 different
machines (with the exception of an old soundcard on one box) I have
tried, including two laptops. I liked it so much I have installed it
on my hard drives to provide a very modern Debian distribution and it
is the only distribution I am now using on those machines.

Phil


-- 
Phil Rasch, Climate Modeling Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Mail     --> P.O. Box 3000, Boulder CO 80307  
Shipping --> 1850 Table Mesa Dr, Boulder, CO 80305
email: pjr at ucar.edu, Web: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/pjr Phone: 303-497-1368, FAX: 303-497-1324