hi. I know iso's are used to be able to burn distro cd and live cds but can they be used for anything else? I've searched for info on them but i get info about burning cds. Could i put my system in an iso so i could just cp the iso to another drive as a backup? Would it be the same size as my system or does it compress it all? Could i then load the iso using something like xen to try to install something on a copy of my system like to test it? Im looking for better ways to maintain my system and curious if isos are what i should look into or if they are just for burning onto cds main. Thanks for any replies in advance.

ISO's that you are referring to are image files of a CDROM disc. If you want to make an image of a partition, you can do exactly that. Make an image file of the partition, which would also copy the filesystem information of the partition and not the iso6990 filesystem. The filesystem that you save the image file onto will need to be able to handle the size. Suppose that you have a 20GB partition. You wouldn't be able to back it up to an external FAT32 usb drive for example, because there is a 2 GB limit. Using a backup up program like Kdar for example may be a better idea.

Look up this url it is wikipedia's definition and a short description on ISO files
also gives pros and cons about it's usage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_image
"ISO image"
Joe

iso files are not compressed

thanks for the link. I found and read that when i did my search on isos.

As this isn't Linux specific, I have moved it to General

Use dd for this. Will write an exact replica of your drive (don't use notrunc option). You can then compress the image for backup/archival purposes. Excellent thread on the dd command available in this forum.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506