Hi,
I have an installation of SLES 9 in my 40gb harddrive. I want to make a backup image for it. Can anyone suggest any software that can be used to do this backup? Does Norton Ghost support linux? Can the backup process be done using windows? Below is my system config.

Pentium 4
Master-Quantum 30gb (window XP SP2)
Slave-Seagate 40gb (SLES 9)
1gb RAM.

Thank you.

dd is probably the best tool for imaging drives under Linux. 'man dd' is your friend.

Never use Windows to attempt to read a Linux partition. NOT EVER.

Norton Ghost supports the ext2 FS. But its not much use if you're using ReiserFS.

Ghost will work on your ext2 or ext3 partitions (http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoff...10/sysreq.html). You could also download the SystemRescueCd from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page and use partimage.

There's g4u (ghost 4 unix):

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

and g4l (ghost 4 linux):

http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/

which looks to be (or to have been) a ripoff of g4u. Whether or not you decide to go with either package, if you delve into the g4u pages you'll come across an area where the author details the similarities between the two programs and the correspondence relating to this issue.


cheers,

Ghost--and any other SW that does verbatim byte-level copying---does not care what file system is on the drive.

Ghost will clone **anything**---as will dd, or any of the other options mentioned.

Thanks for the quick reply. pixellany, you mention about Ghost does not care file system type, so does this mean that it can detect the SLEs 9 partition in windows?

For dd, is it an imaging software that create an image of the partition or is it just copy file form the partition?

Ghost support ext2 FS. rkelsen, I'm quite confius about this statement. what do you mean by it?

dd is a low-level copying utility. It copies bytes without regard to filesystems, partitions, or anything else. Ghost does the same thing.

dd is free, Ghost costs $$

for more that you ever wanted to know about dd:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=366442

If you're looking to image your drives, try PartImage. It's a Drive Image clone for Linux, very user friendly.

Along with dd, PartImage is available on Knoppix and SystemRecoveryCD if you need to recover from a disaster.
PartImage can be used from your active Linux to backup/restore any unmounted partitions without having to boot to cdrom. So you can backuprestore your Windows partition from Linux. It can't do the same with your active partition, you'd have to boot from cd.

Ghost is not Windows. Windows doesn't support ext2 FS.

The best way to use Ghost for your application is to make a Ghost boot floppy and boot from that.

IMO, it is never a good idea to perform low-level HD operations from within a GUI. Particularly Windows.

I couldn't get Ghost to work on a ReiserFS drive.

Needless to say, dd worked.

rkelsen is right. dd works, no matter what you try to do. Sometimes it even does what you expect it to do.

But the real explanation is in this thread

This if you want a real image. If you just want to backup your file system, use tar or star.

jlinkels

Ghost can clone an entire drive irregardless of what filesystem is present. However, it cannot clone a partition unless it knows about the filesystem. At least not using it's default configuration. This, I think, is because it tries to leave out stuff that doesn't need cloning to save space (Windows swap files, etc.) I believe there is an option to make Ghost work more like dd - a straight copy without trying to determine what it is copying. This should work to copy Linux partitions. But something in the back of my mind is telling me that this dd-like straight copy option for Ghost is only available on a full disk cloning, not a partition cloning. I haven't played with Ghost for a while (last version was Ghost2003forDOS) and I really can't remember the details.

Thank you for all the help. Right now, i'm trying to understand more about dd. Maybe after a few hours for a manual walkthrough , i can start backing up my hdisk...

I have acronis true image on my win xp partition. It can make backups of both OS without a problem. I managed to make several backups and restores. No issues yet.