Have 120Gb SSD windows Pro7, Ubuntu 15.10 Plus 500Gb HD for Data eg /home for linux.

Have 1Tb 2.5" USB3 portable HD with 600mb free
How and what programme to take images of all this?

Thanks for any advice.
Richard14

Depends on what you want.

The dd utility by itself can create an image of the entire 12GB SSD and put it in a file on disk.

For the 500GB separate data (as in not required to be bootable), I would use tar. But there is also rsync. Backing up a Windows directory would call for some Windows based backup tool. The advantage of using tar/rsync/whatever is that there is no need to backup any metadata - just the used data blocks.

To restore the dd image copy requires booting a live system, then using dd to copy the image back...

Note: the dd image must be made of the whole device, not by partition. That way it captures any boot blocks, partition tables AND the two bootable systems.

But there are other ways...

Thank You jpolard very helpful.

A lot of people like dd for identical clone images. You could add in gzip or other compression to make the image smaller.

You could also consider any of the other ways too. Tools like redobackup, clonezilla, G4U and rsync tar and cpio along with Gparted/partimage copy partition. Generally faster to copy file by file instead of bit by bit.

If you have a WD drive you could even use their version of Acronis.

Thanks jefro for your input.

As I have not done this before, not sure how to start, do I boot from a live CD/DVD to run dd to backup the entire SSD/HD and do all drives have to be umounted?

Regards,

Richard

It isn't absolutely necessary - but helpful.

The problem is active files... With Linux, the problem is with journald and its binary log. Since the system is active, a dd copy will copy the file as it exists on disk - which will not include any buffers in memory. This in turn, can cause the file to appear to be corrupted - making access to the log problematical for journald, and may even cause journald to abort.

doing the dd from a live system bypasses this. It can also be done in single user mode where the system disk is mounted read only - again, the disk files will be idle as you can't write to a read only filesystem.