In XP Pro, I use Acronis True Image to create a complete backup of my C drive, which has come in handy more than once. How would I achieve the same result with Linux. I've posted several questions on this topic, but haven't really gotten an answer. Does anyone have one? Thanks.

You can use dd to make an image file of the root partition. You can also pipe the output through bzip2 or gzip to reduce it's size.

You can also use tar, or dar or kdar to backup the files in the system. This will allow incremental backups down the road.

What is dd? Is it a program I can install using Synaptic? Thanks.

It is a program that you probably have already. It copies the standard input to the standard output, with options like "if=" for the input file that could be the device and "of=" for the output file which could be the image file to save. You can also set the block size and count as well.

On a unix system, due to it's everything is a file philosophy, you can even cat the device to an image file:
sudo cat /dev/hda1 /mnt/backup/hda1.iso

There is another program called ddrescue that can be used to create an image file if there are bad blocks on the device.

dd comes standard with any Linux as a base tool. I use bootitng, which is similar to acronis, all my partitions are made with it, then I make a compressed image of the partition and store it to my ntfs data partition, then all data in that partition is also backed up on a external USB drive. Bootitng can put the image wherever you want such as: CD's, DVD, USB drives, other partition, network drives, etc. My Fedora takes up about 5.8GB of it's partition, the image is 1.5GB in size. I don't have a separate /home partition as my shared data drive is ntfs (unlimited file size), there's no need to image the swap.
These images have came in handy more often with Linux than with Windows for me, (Windows rarely sees action). But on my system, when imaging a 10GB Linux partition, it takes a couple minutes. When I screw one up, I use bootitng to zero the partition, make a new one in it's place and load an image of a fresh updated installation in about 8 minutes for all those steps.
dd can zero a drive/partition also, but dd does not omit free/unallocated space like bootitng that only copies files, so dd images will be bigger even with compression. The images of any OS can be installed in any partition anywhere on the drive, and as many copies of the same OS image as you want at the same time and bootitng will boot it, they don't need to be in the exact same spot on the drive if bootitng is installed and managing the drive/drives.
Below is a useful link to dd:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506

cd /
tar -cpf /dev/(whatever) --label "full backup-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`" --directory /

If you are already running Acronis you should be able to create an Acronis boot CD that allows you to back up a partition without actually booting into any of them. I am assuming that this should hold true for a *nix partition as it does for a Windows one.

I'll just go check that.

edit: ***10 minutes later***
Yep. Works fine. Use Acronis True Image to create an Acronis boot disk and that will load the program entirely into ram (like a live distro) then you can select your partition and create a backup. The backup can be created directly into one of your partitions, a network device, another HDD even. Just like using the program through windows.

If you are looking for an open source solution then there is BootItNG and G4L (ghost 4 linux), that offer similar abilities.

As a recent Linux newbie (Mandriva) this was one of the first questions I asked myself - how can I do in Mandriva what I routinely do in XP with Ghost?

The simple answer lies in a bootable cd called SystemRescueCD, which has a utility called partimage (along with several other useful utils), and this morning I have proved that it does indeed do what it says on the tin. Having damaged my Mandriva somehow I was able to restore it from external drive within 10 minutes. It also offers compression, which AFAIK dd does not, and also only backs up sectors used, so the image is a lot smaller than dd's.

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

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