taking image of entire partition.
 

Hi All,

Am wondering if it is possible to take snapshot of entire Linux system (with multiboot); and burn it on CD(s); so that if later on, somethin goes wrong you can just restore the image to revert system back to that state, instead of re-installing everything.

specially i'dont want to end up with the image as big as of the partition size. i know; for windows noroton ghost will not take image of entire partition; but only for the "part of partition which is filled up with some data".

does Norton Ghost itself has support for linux?

Appreciate the help.

You can make the image the normal way (with dd) and the compres it using gzip, for example. It should give quite good result.

Have another question on the same topic.

1) to back up the entire system do i have to backup all of the partitions (excluding swap) (assuming i only have single linux distro on my system)?

2) assuming if i have lilo on MBR; how do i take its image; so that i can restore it back.

If you have a lot of space, the easiest way to go about things is to probably just make some huge gzipped tarballs of your partitions. This will copy on the data within them. For instance if you had 3 partitions, /usr, /boot, and /home (excluding swap):

tar czvf home.tar.gz /home

With all three, this of course would stick the end created file in whatever directory you were currently in, so make certain there is room. Burn these to CD once a week, whatever, possibly copy them to another machine, or both.

In the event of a fullblown system meltdown, repartition the drive to the correct size, boot with something like tomsrtbt, copy the tarballs on there (mount the cd, nfs, whathaveyou), untar them, and then as long as things like /dev/hda1 stayed /dev/hda1 and such, just re-run lilo. Its pretty easy.

Although really I just backup all the .conf files and such that aren't still at defaults: httpd.conf, proftpd.conf, the mail spool, etc, and back them up to /home that then gets gzipped up on a cronjob once a day and copied over to a few different machines. In the case of a meltdown I just pick out distro X, install it, and then untar home and monkey about with the .conf files for a little while.

Cheers,

Finegan

I forget the name unfortunately, but there is a project you can find on Freshmeat that creates complete rescue boot CD Images of any Linux System. The Images are compressed, so empty space doesn't take up CD's. The caveat, you need to have Ramdisk, iso9860 filesystem, and any controller you need for CD enabled in your kernel (the software takes your current running kernel to make the boot CD) (It will work with modules as well)