Hard Drive System Backup of Linux?
 

Having finally gotten a reasonably workable installation of SuSE 9 installed on my primary drive (along with Windows), I partitioned my slave with a Linux Ext2 partition (in addition to FAT32 partition) with the thought that I could do system backups there as I do Windows. Ha. Neither Drive Image or Ghost (both about 3 year old versions) can "see" that partition. DI can sort of see the Linux partition on the primary drive (it says it is full, which it is not) but Ghost does not see anything Linux and neither can see the empty partition on the slave. So, is there someway to do a system backup of an operating Linux partition to a backup location? A Google search has not turned up anything useful that I can see. Also is there anyway to do a defrag in Linux? Thank you. KarlT

A newer version of Drive Image will backup an ext2 drive image. Are you sure it's not an ext3 image? There are classic unix tools that are geared toward backing up to tape.

Since you are backing up to a hard drive partition, an easy way to back-up a directory is to use webmin. If webmin is install, point your browser to https://localhost:10000

Select the System tab, and Backup System is the first module on the page. It produces a tar.gz archive, and there is an option to update the archive. You could also elect to do an auto backup, which will do the same thing automatically for you periodically; either daily, hourly, weekly, or monthly.

There are a number of ways that you can solve this problem.

*** Make sure you read the man pages and/or google for it so that you know what you're doing with it. They can ruin your day if used incorrectly.

1) boot up to Suse and try one of the disk partitioning commands
( Redhat has parted and cdisk among others )
The goal here is to ensure that Suse "sees" the disk.

2) You can copy using the "dd" command if the disks are identical. This has the advantage that you can actually replace the original disk with the backup if there is a drive failure.

You can also play with the rsync command, but you would have to mount the disk first. rsync also allows you to backup files to a remote linux computer.

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Have you tried the linux version of ghost? I haven't used it myself.
If you have a CDRW you might also look into Mondo.

list of backup software
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http://linux.tucows.com/backup.html

using dd and rsync
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http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/linuxdisk/ Tools/linuxdisk09.000.html


Hope all of this helps some!

Thom