I plan on installing linux mint 11 and immediately plan on doing a system image back up of the distro with Clonezilla. I also plan on doing three partitions: /root, /home, and swap. Now, I have searched Google and all I have seen is people backing up a Linux system that's installed on one partition (everything installed within /root). How would I go backing up my partitions with Clonezilla? Do I just make a system image of the /root partition and leave /home partition alone? Thanks

Hi there,

good idea; some people and some Linux guides and books even recommend to make /boot a separate small partition (a few 100MB) of its own. Some others, however, say that's nonsense or at least unnecessary.

It depends. We probably agree that the swap partition doesn't need backing up. For the rest ... You could simply make two images - one of / and one of /home. But then again, the /home directory isn't that critical. You might just as well make a copy of that directory into an archive (being root, of course), and restore it later from that archive (being root again). Your choice. :-)

[X] Doc CPU

So, in order to restore my Linux OS back to the way it was, I can just restore the /root partition I backed up? Will there be any misconfigurations with /root and the /home partitions? I really appreciate your responses.

Hi there,

no, you may have misunderstood me. You definitely back up and restore both partitions, one after another. I just pointed out that the /home partition doesn't have to be imaged; a simple file-oriented backup would do. Yet it's a two-step process at ay rate.

No, because between the two steps you don't log in to the system that is being backed up or restored. And even if you did, you would log in as root, and the root user's home directory usually isn't under /home, but instead it's /root. So it's included in the image of your main partition (unless your distro uses a different location for the root user's home directory).

[X] Doc CPU

I think I understand what you are saying. I should back up the /root partition and then back up the files of the /home partition. I have all my personal documents and of that sort on a separate partition on my external hd, so that wont be a problem. But I'm guessing that backing up the /home partition is somewhat important since it houses some program configs of that sort? In that case, I will just make an image of both /root and /home and restore both when needed.