Is there any problem using a 160 GB (or more) external hard drive to back up and restore an 80 GB hard drive??

Thanks, Len Tyree. http://linuxquestions.cachefly.net/i...s_lq/icon5.gif

Why would you think or ask if it's a problem? If you have 80GB of data to backup and then restore, 160GB should hold 80GB of data, at least I hope it would unless you're asking a trick question or some kind..

No trick question trickykid.
Question. If I back up my 80 gb to a 160 gb hard drive, no problem, it will work.
However, when I reload the 160 gb back onto the 80 gb, will the 160 gb stop sending when it reaches the 80 gb amount? Or will it possibly ask for more room from the 80 gb hard drive? (I do not want to partition the 160 gb external hard drive. (Don't know how)).

Thanks much. len tyree

This is all about backup software. Some make an image out of your hard drive, witch also keeps information about the size and partitions and everything.
But theoretically it should work.

Fedora Development

If the backup you are performing creates a large image file or a large tar file, make sure that the filesystem can use files > 4 GB in size. If the filesystem is FAT32, then reformat it. Perhaps ext3.

If you are simply recursively copying directories, use a linux filesystem that can also save the Linux user, group, permissions, attributes and acls.

Learn what you need to backup and what you shouldn't. You could back up /tmp/ but you don't need to. You shouldn't backup /proc, /dev or /sys.

I would only recommend an image backup if you have a new install and you want to reinstall to that point quickly. This is done for servers where downtime needs to be short. If there is an reading a block on either the device being backed up or from the backup device during restore, you will waste a lot of time. A full backup followed by incremental backups would be better. A periodic full backup followed by a differential backup would allow you to restore from just the full and last differential backup.

Some file systems have a dump program that will allow you to perform a backup while the filesystem is live. E.G. xfs-dump or an LVM snapshot.

Problem resolved, thanks to the help from trickykid, Nightfish and jschiwal.
I will just do a full backup to the external and recover from there if/when necessary. This will be slower, but for me, for now, a-ok.
Later on, I will learn how to do partial backups and restoration.

Thanks to all for the help. Len.

in theory if the backup program attampts to put more data than the drive can cope with back on it, you should just get an error out of disk space message
this might mean that the restore dousent work, but it wont dammage the drive