Image Hard drive Ubuntu Operating system 9.10 Complete back up and restore
Image Hard drive Ubuntu Operating system 9.10 Complete back up and restore.
Changing over Hard Drives need a complete back up not just save files. So the image can be restored on any hard drive that restores the computer to its original state before it was imaged. |
quick and dirty: from a live disk - total disk clone.
sudo swapoff -a sudo dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /path/to/storage/sda.dd.gz restore it: sudo gzip -dc /path/to/storage/sda.dd.gz | dd of=/dev/sda sudo swapon -a on systems that use uuids you may need to prepare them as normal dev labels first - to avoid conflicts. Or you can regenerate uuids in a script. If you have to do this a lot, then you'll be wanting to put all above in some sort of script which also handles pushing the image out over a network etc. |
As you see I'm a bit of a traditionalist. There are lots of programs providing different amounts of control:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilit....shtml#imaging |
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Tried the example from live disk several times without any success.
Thanks Is there a way of saving it to a external Hard Drive. I tried that with the sdb1. Quote:
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I have successfully upgraded several machines with both Windows XP on NTFS partitions & Suse 11.1 on EXT3 partitions using CloneZilla. This was to replace existing hard drives with larger ones. In the case of one Win XP it was to provide a recovery solution, as I no longer have the install disks.
You need to give it a try first to understand the settings, but it will work between disks with different geometries. The best way seems to be to clone to a bare unformatted drive, and then resize & add partitions afterwards. I was quite suprised the first time I did it with XP which was to replace a failing drive, and the machine came up with an error message at POST warning of a hardware change. Going into set-up and then rebooting and it all worked without any reconfiguration. PartedMagic has a disk image function which will achieve the same result, but I haven't tried that yet. |
I second Clonezilla LiveCD. The best cloning tool on Linux by far.
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You are unlikely to have enough RAM to save the disk image in the live session anyway. When I do this, I boot from an external HDD. As the others have commented, you may be more comfortable with a gui tool like clonezilla. I gave you a link to a huge list with descriptions for all you options in my previous post. |
Just to add an FYI. It you use dd to create an image file and pipe it through gz as Simon Bridge suggested; you can first use dd to create a zeroed file which nearly fills the disk, and delete the file. For a new installation on an old disk this will greatly reduce the size of the saved backup image.
Use "sudo df -B512 <device>" to learn how many free blocks are available. Then create a temporary file just shy of that size. Here is an example using a formated, mounted image (I didn't want to mess with a partiton on my laptop): Code:
df -B512 /mnt/tera/ I wouldn't recommend using images for regular backups, but they are useful after a fresh installation to quickly recover after a hard disk failure. |
A lot of corporate CTOs like to mandate disk images as a failsafe. I've also seen internet cafes restore all their machines from an image each night to avoid malware.
For backups, we have so many other options - we can avoid high bandwidth costs by maintaining caching repositories and deploying thin clients to centralise maintenance. We can use offsite net storage for file backups - with utilities like rsync. The brute force approaches that we see so often are usually a response to having to put up with the restrictions built into a proprietary system. Without knowing why thedoctor wants to clone the drive, we cannot really advise. @jschiwal: I had no idea the saving was so great! I've mostly only done this on fresh installs to distribute to many identical machines. How good is this as a zeroing method against forensic file recovery? |
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Thanx.
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Thanks for the poem. Your SpellChequer must have a poetic license plugin.
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imaging the hard drive
Will that program work if saving to a external hard drive as in sdb1.
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Simply mount the external drive and redirect the output of gzip to a file on it.
So if you mount it on mnt/, then sudo dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /path/to/storage/sda.dd.gz Doing an image backup of sda would be better done using a live cd. If you need to restore, you will probably be using a live CD anyway. |
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