I have been running Linux mint as a file and print server for about 4 months. I finally have it running perfect and I am looking for the best method to restore to the current condition if my hard drive fails.I have duplicated the drive using the "dd" command but can't get the duplicated drive to boot. After the boot menu I get an error because the boot sequence has references to the original drive. I copied a Maxtor drive to a segate and at boot up it continues to look for the Maxtor drive. I would appreciate any help in solving this problem, I am also open to a better method of backing up the system and settings. I am very comfortable with the DOS command line but know very little about Linux command line, but I am not afraid to learn. THANKS

The boot system doesn't look for any specific drive, definitely it doesn't care about seagate vs. maxtor.

However it does care about the naming of the drives, both the naming of the drives in grub.conf and /etc/fstab will need to be adjusted if the name of the drives change (hda vs. sda, hda vs. hdb or whatever).

Personally, I wouldn't bother with dd. Either use tar, rsync or wahtever fits you. Oh, and don't forget that if you make live backups (while the disk is being written to and changed) you risk getting an useless backup. You should mount the drives read-only before doing backups.

ps. Unless you have lvm (or an fs that can do live snapshots, which is unlikely in linux).

Depending on what you want to do, you may be interested in looking at something like Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/

use VMs and have fun backing up your servers and restoring them with ease, try VMware Esxi,

I would personally first remove the machine from the network if it is serving as a server so that clients are not requesting anything. And then would make sure it is not in use as said so that it is not writing to system files. And then use clonezilla or something similar (if you have one with license) to clone the drive by connecting one as primary and other as slave or secondary.
On your problem, it could have been caused if there are references to the UUID of your original drive that your OS is searching for. You will need to remove those if any.

While a direct clone as above is a good idea, it's also probably a good idea to make a case of how could I build it from scratch in as little time as possible procedure too. Like recreating the configuration and re-installing the entire OS, just incase their is a problem with clone too. Just putting it out, also you can use rsync too what should be able to enable you to copy a large ammount of data.

Hii

As my friend mentioned above. rsync is the best option I also recommend others for taking backups.
The rsync uses protocol which allows rsync to transfer just the differences between two sets of files across the network connection.
because of which it very fast too.

Cheerzz!!

Thanks for all of the comments, all were helpful but it sounds like clonezilla may be the best answer. I am continuing to discover those nuggets of gold like clonezilla. I will continue to try to boot the drive copied with dd, (just for fun)