Hard Drive Image Backup question.

eggman95 · 12-08-2006, 09:56 PM

I am running Slackware 10.1 on an old IBM T21. I was wondering what is the best way to create an image of the entire contents of the hard drive? Something that does the same thing that Norton Ghost does.

I would like to save the image to a networked drive.

Just in case the HD drives, I would like to replace it, and just drop the image back on to it, and be back up and running.

Any info would be greats, thanks.

-Henry

tshrinivasan · 12-08-2006, 10:50 PM

dd command can satisfy your need.

man dd

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/networkdrive/image.img

or

www.freshmeat.net/projects/g4l
This is Ghost for Linux.

Check this too.

eggman95 · 12-09-2006, 12:15 AM

Great, thanks!

uselpa · 12-09-2006, 08:40 AM

I use rsync or tar for that. The advantage over dd is that only used space is copied, whereas dd copies unused space as well. Also, tar and rsync are filesystem independant so you can restore on a different file system than the original. tar can even compress the image on the fly.
Just make sure that permissions and ownership are preserved.