I know this subject has been done to death. But over the weekend I set up a SuSE 10.2 server to replace my suddenly defunct Windows 2003 server.

It's now to the point I'm getting e-mail and the OS is running smoothly.

At this point I'd like to take a snapshot of the 20 gig OS partition, so if anything happens I can take the snapshot to either repair the SO, or just re-image the whole OS.

I plan on doing the automatic update thing, so if something goes wrong with that I would like to be able to repair it quickly.

Try Clonezilla

also partimage

rsync, amanda, dump, cpio, tar, bacula, backuppc and the list continues on types of tools, commands and utilities to use to backup your system. Try searching the keyword "Bare Metal Restore" cause that's what it sounds as if you're wanting if you're OS crashes and you want to restore to the same state as before it crashed.

I didn't like bacula, too cui and too tape oriented. I tried mondo but it wouldn't boot. I finally settled on Systemrescuecd. http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

I have many questions!

First, there's a FAT32 partition with the Dell utilities on it. I can no longer boot from it. Is there a way of putting it on the bootable devices?

Second, somehow my hardware RAID became two seperate drives. In the SuSE startup I can actually boot off of either one, they are slightly different versions of SuSE 10.2.

So, do I need RAID 1? Couldn't I use Partimage and rsync to keep the two drives identical? I can see lots of advantages here to running on one drive but every night syncing up the other drive. Something hoses my OS, I can just boot up on the other one.

Thirdly, can I use partimage to image my very important XP notebook?

I have a Dell Poweredge SC430.