Full disk image

Hi

I’m new to Linux and have found myself reinstalling a couple of times in the past month. Could anyone recommend a method of creating a full disk image. I have the Acronis bootable media, would this work to backup Linux partitions? I’m thinking that Acronis doesn’t know or care what is written to the disk as it works at a lower level.

Any advice appreciated.

clonezilla is a free Linux based disk backup CD. Search for it.

Hi

I’m new to Linux and have found myself reinstalling a couple of times in the past month. Could anyone recommend a method of creating a full disk image. I have the Acronis bootable media, would this work to backup Linux partitions? I’m thinking that Acronis doesn’t know or care what is written to the disk as it works at a lower level.

Any advice appreciated.

Now you did not indicate why you are reinstalling openSUSE. When hard drives fail, there is no substitute for a real backup, but I suggest there are a few other things you might consider.

  1. Always create a separate /home area partition. So, when you must reinstall openSUSE for any reason, your personnel settings are maintained.
  2. Keep two hard drives. Copy all real important data to a partition on a second hard drive and this second drive could be used for backup images as well.

By keeping a separate /home area and making two copies of all important data, you diminish problems of reinstalling openSUSE. Again, backups are also important, but not the only way to prevent data loss. Reinstalling openSUSE should then not be such a big deal since your personnel settings are maintained and you can always get another copy of that important file on the second disk.

Thank You,

I reinstalled because I accidentally screwed my graphics driver and could only get a console. I’m sure there was a better approach but it didn’t take too long and I took the opportunity to separate my home partition. I need a solution that will keep lamp and all my other applications and settings safe. Downloading Clonezilla now.

Thanks for your replies.

Mike

On 2011-08-06 14:26, baynham wrote:
> I have the Acronis bootable media, would this work to
> backup Linux partitions? I’m thinking that Acronis doesn’t know or care
> what is written to the disk as it works at a lower level.

It does care, I understand. I heard it works with linux partitions, too.
You can try it if you have it, I have no first hand experience of it.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)

you can use redo backup. it’s a live cd & has simple & easy step to make backup of your HDD. It’s graphical. It also contains other packages like chromium, testdisk, photorec, fsarchiver, gparted etc.

In Linux, as long as you have a separate /home partition, you should not need to backup everying, just /home. I have tried backing up everything but I found that reinstalling / was much quicker than backing up and restoring /. A lot will depend on how many changes you have made to /etc. whether you have any mysql databases and how many programs you use that are not part of the standard installation. But when I last had to reinstall / it took me an hour and a half including downloading the CD, installing the system, updating the system and adding the other programs I wanted.

Your experience may differ depending on your needs but I have only needed to restore twice in six years, both of them because I was trying to be too clever.

Like ken mentioned clonezilla is good ap for backup.

You can choose to bac up full disc or each partitioin separatelly (home, windows, multimedia etc) its handy and with clonesilla it takes about 10 in in overall to back up linux both home (25gb) and root (17gb) partitions to usb drive.
There is an option to back it up to network drive to.