Hi all,

So, I've finally got a working debian stable sarge system up and running. This was my first time using linux, so far I am quite impressed, for some reason I was under the impression that linux would be MUCH different than I am used to. Anyway, now that I have everything setup what I want to know is can I create a backup so that when I start playing with the system (upgrading the kernel, etc) and I inevitably break things because I don't know what I'm doing yet, I can fall back to my current setup with out reinstalling from the debian Cd's. What I'm finding is the hardest thing is that things which I figured out how to do in windows years ago I don't know how to do in debian, for example it took me forever to set a static IP for port forwarding and to configure the samba to see the shared files on my winxp machine. It is fun though, doing a lot of learning. If you guys can help me out with this backup thing I'm sure it will save me tons of time.

Thanks!

Matt

Hello,

For a full backup of the system, I suggest :
- boot with a live cd live knoppix
- have a HD with free space and with ext3 filesystem
- backup the MBR of the master drive using 'sfdisk'
% sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.out (this save the hda MBR)
% sfdisk /dev/hda < hda.out (this replace the hda MBR if you need to restore the partition table)
- mount the partition and create a tar archive of the mounted partitions
exemple with 2 partitions ext3 (dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2) and 1 swap (/dev/hda3)
- no need to backup the swap partition
- mount -r /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1
- cd /my_backup_place
- tar cvfzps hda1_backup.tar.gz /mnt/hda1
- mount -r /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda2
- tar cvfzps hda2_backup.tar.gz /mnt/hda2

That's the way I work, it's not always the easiest but it's the way I do.
--
free_ouyo