Hello folks,
This forum's never led me down.. All my queries got solved..
Now, i need little help here.
I want to image my / partition so as if something goes wrong, i can just restore the image. In windows, i used Macrium Reflect which worked flawlessly.
How do i do this in Ubuntu 10.10?
Googling yielded some results like use partimage or ddrescue etc. but i'm confused.
Can anyone guide me through the process?
Thanks

I just boot a live Linux CD and use tar to make a copy of the partition.

You could also use Clonezilla booted from a live CD.

It is possible to make a backup of the root file system while the system is running but I don't like to back up a live system.

I also like to make a backup of the MBR before I do the system backup. I usually only do this once when the system is first installed. I put the backup of the MBR into the /root directory or the / directory. Now if I have to replace the disk drive I can restore the MBR boot code from the backup in the file system.

use the parted magic live cd or system rescue CD

Start gparted

highlight partition
copy

paste in free space somewhere else (in another hdd usually)

Do not do this from within Ubuntu


(With clonezilla whole hard disk can be cloned)

I read the tar method.. But won't it take much space sitting around? And won't imaging system partition back up the mbr even? If not, how do i do it?

Not if you use gzip to make the archive file. Many of the files are ASCII text so they will compress very well.
Adding the z to the tar command will automatically feed the files through gzip to compress them before they are added to the archive file.

So if I had booted a live Linux CD such as the System Rescue CD, and if I had mounted my installed Linux partition under /mnt/sda2, and if I had mounted my external disk drive backup partition under /mnt/backup then the following would create a good backup of the installed Linux root file system in a file called archive.tgz on the external disk drive.

And the steps to restore it?

The steps to restore onto the same disk are very similar.
Boot a live Linux CD.
Mount the external disk partition holding the archive file to /mnt/backup.
Mount the partition intended to hold the root file system to /mnt/sda2.
Then do this:
This will not restore the MBR. That can be recreated by chrooting into the restored file system and running update-grub and grub-install.

If you are restoring the entire archive then you will need to format the destination partition before trying to write the backup files onto it.

I like fsarchiver for backing up a partition. Never had a problem with it. Unlike partition magic, fsarchiver can restore to a partition smaller than the original as long as there's enough space for the uncompressed filesystem.