Hi,

Can anyone tell me about backup technology.


I'm need to do a backup, which backup the image from the original
harddisk to another new harddisk.

The purpose to do that for the security issue, which to prevent if anything is
happening for the original harddisk and the backup harddisk will be replaces in my linux box.

Any idea?

Thanks

To create a disk image, use dd.

Hi,

Thank you for reply.

I'm not sure about dd, I did some reserch for disk images and also "dd"
command line. Please further details.

Or should I need to install any utilities software like Ghost....
please correct me if I'm wrong.

My intended is to "duplicate" the original harddisk to another new harddisk (as backup), which to prevent any happening for the original harddisk.

Could you please detail the alternative solution to implement it?

Thanks

If you want a bit-by-bit copy, do "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" for the proper drives.

Hi Matir,

Thanks for the command line you provided.
So I probably no need to install any software for implement this.
Just "diskcp" command will do.

Base from the command line you give

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

Can I assume "/dev/hda" is the Source and "/dev/hdb" as Dest.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

But at the beginning, what should I do for my new harddisk?
example formatting? and mountting?

I check from the website, I found the below command

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=myimagefile bs=18k
dd if=myimagefile of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k


Thanks

In order to use the dd mechanism, the drive does not need to be formatted or mounted. if= is the input, and of= is the output.

Just use Partimage - its an open source program designed to do exactly this and it has network support.

If you're using it to backup non-root partitions then you can just run it from within your Linux distro (after unmounting the partitions first). If you need to backup the whole thing including the root partition then you'll need to download one of these LiveCDs which has Partimage on it and boot your machine off it:
http://www.sysresccd.org/ (smaller contains only essential system rescue tools)
http://www.knoppix.org/ (larger - aims to be complete Linux system on a CD)


Also keep in mind that backing up from one hard disk to another in the same machine is not a safe or reliable backup method at all, since most data loss scenarios are just as likely to delete stuff off both hard drives (eg. rm -rf /*).

OTOH if you're doing it for system redudancy (ie. if hda fails you can just boot the machine up with hdb) then that's exactly what RAID was designed for. Its simple to setup Software RAID1 (a simple drive mirroring setup) in Linux and is far more likely to work properly than trying to copy the drive image every so often.