12.3 total Backup.

What is the best way to Backup the whole system? I have been following
the thread on backup with YaSt but did not want to ask this on it has
it would be slightly off topic.

I current use rsync to Backup up /home but have not figured out all the
parameters to make it the most compact.

I want to backup my 12.3 disk completely before installing 13.2 for
testing. Signature has current system I will be using for backup or
should I completely update 12.3 and then use 12.3 to backup whole disk.

Thanks for any pointers

Russ

openSUSE 13.1(Linux 3.11.10-11-desktop x86_64|
Intel(R) Quad Core™ i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz|8GB DDR3|
GeForce 8400GS (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.79)|KDE 4.13.2

On 2014-06-20 17:32, upscope wrote:

> I want to backup my 12.3 disk completely before installing 13.2 for
> testing.

For a full backup, needed for a full recovery from scratch
(emergencies), I’d use clonezilla full disk backup.

Reasonable fast and safe. Caveat is you need to boot it from cd or usb
stick, and have the machine offline for some time, perhaps hours.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

Agreed. The same advice from me. Of course, you will need another large enough storage device, such as a second drive or an external drive, to save the Clonezilla backup archives on.

BTW: I use Clonezilla to create a full drive backup once a month, keeping a few on the external drive and rotating them. Once a week, I synchronize my DATA directories to external drives using Unison, and use Clonezilla to backup the /home partition to the external drive. I keep several of those on the external, rotating them.

Has proven to be a priceless, often called-upon rescue plan.

Also note: There is a network version of Clonezilla that can go out to machines on your network with the Clonezilla client installed and back up according to schedules, and so forth. In fact, I think it can tunnel across the internet.

On 2014-06-20 23:36, Fraser Bell wrote:

> Agreed. The same advice from me. Of course, you will need another
> large enough storage device, such as a second drive or an external
> drive, to save the Clonezilla backup archives on.

I’m considering preparing a big HD with a small system partition, to
install there a small rescue system, which includes clonezilla. The rest
of the hard disk would be a huge data partition to store the backup,
possibly encrypted.

I actually have such an external boot hard disk prepared, but not with
clonezilla.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

Carlos E. R. wrote:

> On 2014-06-20 23:36, Fraser Bell wrote:
>
>> Agreed. The same advice from me. Of course, you will need another
>> large enough storage device, such as a second drive or an external
>> drive, to save the Clonezilla backup archives on.
>
> I’m considering preparing a big HD with a small system partition, to
> install there a small rescue system, which includes clonezilla. The
> rest of the hard disk would be a huge data partition to store the
> backup, possibly encrypted.
>
> I actually have such an external boot hard disk prepared, but not
with
> clonezilla.
>
Thanks for the responses. I will look at Clonezilla. I have an
external 1 TB drive I use strictly for backups. It has 100GB for
Windows studd, 400 GB for 12.3 and 500 GB for 13.1. Will get rid of
the 12.3 part soon and use it.


openSUSE 13.1(Linux 3.11.10-11-desktop x86_64|
Intel(R) Quad Core™ i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz|8GB DDR3|
GeForce 8400GS (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.79)|KDE 4.13.2

On 2014-06-21 16:49, upscope wrote:
> Carlos E. R. wrote:

> Thanks for the responses. I will look at Clonezilla. I have an
> external 1 TB drive I use strictly for backups. It has 100GB for
> Windows studd, 400 GB for 12.3 and 500 GB for 13.1. Will get rid of
> the 12.3 part soon and use it.

If you use it for backups, you don’t need separate partitions for each
Linux system; a single huge partition with directories conserves more space.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

Carlos E. R. wrote:

> On 2014-06-21 16:49, upscope wrote:
>> Carlos E. R. wrote:
>
> …
>
>> Thanks for the responses. I will look at Clonezilla. I have an
>> external 1 TB drive I use strictly for backups. It has 100GB for
>> Windows, 400 GB for 12.3 and 500 GB for 13.1. Will get rid of
>> the 12.3 part soon and use it.
>
> If you use it for backups, you don’t need separate partitions for
each
> Linux system; a single huge partition with directories conserves more
> space.
Thanks. I will look at doing that when and if I ever get 13.2 to
install. I’m having some kind of BIOS issue with the drives order. I
will be opening a new thread on that.

openSUSE 13.1(Linux 3.11.10-11-desktop x86_64|
Intel(R) Quad Core™ i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz|8GB DDR3|
GeForce 8400GS (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-331.79)|KDE 4.13.2

Like the OP I was looking to completely back up my system. I downloaded and made a “disk” image of my system. What I’m wondering is, let’s say that the hard disk that my OS is on explodes today, will I be able to restore that image to a new hard disk so long as it is of equal or greater size? Should I Be making disk or partition images for this purpose?

My setup is:
100Gb SSD Drive for ‘/’ and ‘/home’
1Tb HDD for ‘/storage’.

Any advice on this matter would be appreciated. I’m a bit of a back-up freak and would like to know what the best course would be to restore to a new disk.

  • Greg

On 2014-06-23 14:26, gregORe wrote:
>
> Like the OP I was looking to completely back up my system. I downloaded
> and made a “disk” image of my system. What I’m wondering is, let’s say
> that the hard disk that my OS is on explodes today, will I be able to
> restore that image to a new hard disk so long as it is of equal or
> greater size?

Yes. If the destination is at least the same size, restore is easy.
However, often you have to edit fstab and grub settings to match.

If the destination is bigger, resizing is possible, but not always
trivial. The restore application may support this automatically, if not,
can often be done manually.

If the destination is smaller, only some sophisticated imaging software
can handle this with relative ease.

> Any advice on this matter would be appreciated. I’m a bit of a back-up
> freak and would like to know what the best course would be to restore to
> a new disk.

I keep images of partitions needed for the system to boot, and file
backups for data partitions (which are often much bigger). Sometimes I
also keep (simultaneous to the image) file backups of the system areas,
in order to be able to easily look at older versions of config files.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

Yes.

Should I Be making disk or partition images for this purpose?

If Using Clonezilla:

I tend to make sure I have both. You could create your new disk with a slightly older full-disk image, then restore a later, more up-to-date /home partition image, or even restore to a spare space to rescue one or two crucial files you have somehow “misplaced” since you made your last backups.

I rotate on the basis of 1 Full Disk backup per month, and a partition image backup of my data on a weekly basis.

Note that, from a full disk backup made by Clonezilla, you can choose to simply restore only one of the partitions, so you don’t need to make partition images at the same time you do your full backup.