Situation: Two hard drives, Windows 7 and Zorin 12 Core on one; Ubuntu and Zorin 12 Ultimate on the other. I want to backup all on a new Passport. Zorin has a backup tool, Deja Dup. How do I keep the three Linux backups separate and distinct, so they don't all run together? So far, I have backed up Zorin Ultimate and Ubuntu, but I can't tell by looking at the Passport what the heck is what, as all the units look the same (there are 59 of them). Very confusing. Each has a little page icon and a boatload of numbers. most have "volume 1, 2 etc, but some do not. When I click on them, a bunch of gibberish comes up. What to make of all this?

Are you trying to back up the OSes as partitions or are you doing a file by file backup?

I was planning on doing both, a normal file backup, plus a system image for each OS. So far, I have only tried the file backup. I'm confused by the fact that there are 59 units on my passport, where in Windows there would just be one, which would say "Michael Backup" or something. Did the backup do all the files on all OS's? The only backups I've run so far are Zorin 12 and Ubuntu 16. These are separate partitions on the same drive, and I ran each backup from within the OS.

Congratulations on checking your backup(s) - most people seem to treat it as "set-and-forget".
dejadup is a GUI front-end to duplicity. Search on that or look at its manpage for background.

Not my choice of backup, as I prefer to be in control - and it (deja) is (seems to me) aimed at single user file backup scenario. Duplicity uses librsync which is good, but adds complexity to the restore - which is bad.
Clonezilla is the generally recommended (free) tool for image backups - but there are a bunch out there. As for file backups, you need to decide what you want - for example, point-in-time backups, incremental diffs, both ?. There are several based on rsync that are quite good - here is a good list of options.

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You do not have to back up a distribution from within the distribution. You can backup everything from within a single distribution. The way that you keep the backups straight is by setting up a script using rsync which runs a separate rsync command to selectively back up each distribution's files to its own backup directory.

I suggest that you forget the direct copy backups since direct copy backups and restores are much more error prone than backing up by file system. You could use the backup space set aside for direct copies to keep multiple generations of your rsync backups.

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Steve Stites

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Thanks for the help. I partitioned the Passport into two partitions, one for Windows and one for Linux. Both are formatted to NTFS, as formatting the Linux one to ext4 resulted in my not being able to use it. I backed up my three Linux distros fine, as well as my Windows 7. Also made an image of the Windows 7.

I tried using Redo to image the Linux drives, but Redo didn't let me choose the Linux partition as a place to save it. It did recognize the Passport when I used the disk utility, but when I tried to set up the imaging process, it was not listed.

Does Redo have a problem with NTFS?

Just a caveat that if you do a Linux system file backup to a NTFS drive, you will lose file attribute info unless you use a backup program that stores this info elsewhere or backs up the files in a format that is not akin to a straight copy.

For info, my backup external HDD has two partitions, one NTFS the other ext4. I back up data files and partition images to the NTFS partition (the former with FreeFileSync, the latter offline with Macrium Reflect), and my root and home partitions to the ext4 partition (with FreeFileSync). Works fine for me.

hydurga, do you have any idea why ext4 (or ext3 for that matter) would not work for backup? After I formatted to ext4, I could not actually use the partition. Could not create a new folder or do anything. I wanted ext 4 but for some reason it just wouldn't work.

Do you still have your drive as part NTFS, part ext4? If so, can you post the output from gparted, fdisk or similar so we can check the partitioning looks ok?

If the partitioning does look ok, what parameters are you using to mount the ext4 device? Also, what user attributes does the ext4 root directory currently have? It could well be a problem associated with user rights i.e. you may have to change or take user control of the entire device to be able to write to it.

Actually, I have both partitions formatted NTFS. I'm considering merging them, as the "windows" part. is going to have so much more on it than the "linux" part. Might as well just have one big NTFS part. If I run into problems I'll deal with them later.

Originally I planned to have backups and also images on the Linux part. but I realized that, since Linux is so easy to install, it may not be worth it. Just reinstall and migrate your files. Of course I'd have to configure things, but even that is pretty quick. Plus with reinstalling you get an up-to-date version of the OS. Then again, if you have to download the OS, that's where having an image would save time.