Hi, this question has kind of been asked before but I'd really just like to run my idea/thoughts past someone with more experience encase I'm missing something obvious.

It's about creating a complete backup of my machine.

What I want to do is completely backup my whole computer, everything!, because I've got it just right. If something were to go wrong then I want to restore right back to the way the system is right now (from a rescue disk).

I know that using dd to do a byte level backup would be best but I read that it's not all that great for restoring the system (HDD's sizes must be the same).

Rsync looks favourite but can it copy the root directory... i.e. "rsync -a / /media/backup/" and all the partitions. I just not sure whether it can do the whole computer .

Dump is another tool but it seems to have dependencies to tool versions. And again I don't know if it will do the whole system and how easy it is to restore.

Any advice or tips?

*EDIT*
It is OK I have found a solution. There is a tool called FSArchiver that looks to do what I want and it comes part of SystemRescueCd (a bootable CD used to fix computers). It turns out that the backup I'm looking to do is at the file system level where the tools above are really file level backups. We live and learn.

If you don't perform an image backup, don't backup the /proc, /sys, /dev or /tmp partitions. The first two are psuedo filesystems. /dev is created when you boot, and backing up /tmp would be a waste of time. You can also use tar, which is what dump would use.

Yes, if you restore the image. You could however create your partitions on a new drive, and then mount the partitions that exists in the image backup. Now you can simply copy them to the new hard drive.

Run "fdisk -lu" to print out the starting points of each partition on your system. You can use the offsets with losetup to attach a loop device at that offset. A hard copy printout of the "fdisk -lu" results will make this process easy.

sudo /sbin/losetup -fs -o $((512*<offset>))
sudo mount -t <filesystem> /dev/loop# /mnt

Where offset is the block offset to the start of the partition. loop# is the loop device, such as /dev/loop0, which the losetup command returns.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi, thanks for taking the time to reply jschiwal. Very helpful.

I'm not really sure now the best way forward as there are many options available. Someone posted about something called Clonezilla as well which seems like another option. Clone the system onto another drive.

I've used the offset and loop before to try and mount a virtual hard drive so I know what your suggesting there. I like the idea of doing the low level copy that dd provides. Least I know now that the same size drive 'problem' isn't so much of a problem after all (as long as the offsets are recorded).

Yes thanks for this, have to think more on it. Weight up the options.

Mmmm - I detest dd as a backup tool. Doesn't tell you when it runs into errors. Use a tool that understands filesystems, and allows you to restore to a different filesystem if wanted.
I'm going to look at fsarchive today - amongst other things offers does integrity checking (file level).

Worked as advertised. I compressed a test SLES11 system to about 40% - took a while, but was on the same physical disk (different partition); lots of I/O interference I guess.
I then wrote 2k of /dev/urandom over the partition to ensure the filesystem was trashed. Grub error 17 on reboot - what a surprise. Restore was much quicker, and the reboot worked fine. Lilo would probably be more of a problem, but a chroot and rerunning lilo would probably suffice.

1 members found this post helpful.

Wow, thanks syg00... you have no idea how much I appreciate that. thank you...

Going to go with it, liked the idea of the rescue disk and the fact it restores backup to different size disks.
Need to find enough external storage to backup onto now.

Thanks everyone for contributing I've got a way forward now.