Anybody knows how to backup a complete harddisk as an image ?
If anything horrible ever occurs, it's easy this way to reinstall a configured
system fast and painless.

I'm using this for windows and I'm very happy to have it,
and since Linux is said to be so much better,
the tool to do this must be available somewhere I should think.

Which Version. I thought I saw a Backup wizard in 10.0

If you want to use a image on disc. May i suggest Drive image 7, not sure if Norton Ghost will back up linux partitons, but I know Drive image 7 will. and it will compress the image file pretty well, unless of course you have a lot of uncompressable Media files cause they are already compressed. but this will split the image into sever parts so you may fit them on a CD or even a DVD.

no linux program that can do the job ?
I have no dual boot on my linux,
and I don't intend to start installing that.

I use partimage running from system rescue cd for that purpose and it works pretty well.

drive image 7 is bootable with builtin support for burning.

thats a very good choice

thanx doug_s
this seems to do what I need.

I test it as soon as my server is completely configured
one of these days ....

you shouldt wait for your server to be completly configurted before backing up your stuff
its almost never completly set...

back it up now...
set your things
back it up again...

dont be afraid to back up, u can overwrite old images. better be safe than sorry

well
a wise man/woman can take some good advice :+)

guess what I'm trying to do ...

well ...

it's a problem:
I have a partition of 2 Gb free,
rights r open for everyone to read/write,
but partimage keeps complaining it has no rights on this disk
or the disk is full and fails to make a temp file.

How much space does it need to backup a partition of 2 Gb,
or do I need to do something else first ???

I haven't seen anything like that happen so I'm going to try guessing here.

Partimage, like ghost, only backs up sectors that are in use, not unused space. If I have a 10 GB partition and only 2.5 GB are used I get a backup file thats 2.5 GB. Actually since partimage breaks up the backups according to a size you specify (default 2GB) I get a file filename.000 of 2GB and filename.001 of 0.5GB. When you do the restore you just give it filename.000 as input and it figures out it also needs to read filename.001 on its own.

When you use this type of utility you can't store your backup file in the partition that you are backing up. You backup one partition into a file in another partition. I do a mkdir and a mount of the partitition I'm storing the file in before starting partimage and leave the partition I'm backing up unmounted.

If you really only have one partition you could use tar instead of partimage, just be careful not to backup your backup file.

If this doesn't help try posting more details about exactly how you are using partimage.

ok, meaby some more details:

I have 2 scsi disks of 4 Gb,
one has 4 partitions (/ /home /swap)
the second disk is split up in 2 partitions (/psql /data)
I selelct the root partition,
and as destination I select the second partition
(that's the /data partition)
which calls something like scsi/gate0/disk1/part5
just to give you an idea, I don't remember excactly

so as destination it looks like scsi/gate0/disk1/part5/backup

2 screens furter, where it's supposed to start backup,
I get the message that scsi/gate0/disk1/part5 is not big enough
or has no rights to write there

/data is 2Gb and empty, and yes, formatted