Task:

To backup for drive failure:
Backup entire linux partition.
Backup incremental's of entire partition.

To restore to new drive:
re-install on different partition, likely different device number/guid/size.

issues:
tar ... certain files are locked, certain files should not be backed-up
partimage ... when restored, the size must be the same? and guid will be different?
incremental's ???

I am looking to avoid reinstall of os, want configuration and installed patches etc all available immediately, but will consider alternatives.

Desktop - Multi-part, Ubuntu, Fedora/Centos, (might even use for windows)
ALL offline for now. I'll use one instance to backup other instances.

To backup partition content, rsync might be useful. Rsync supports incremental sync as well.

To backup an entire parition, disk dump (dd) will help. However, I am afraid about incremental support in disk dump.

these are two raw utils that I have used for backing up files and images.

Have you considered RAID1?

Before everyone tells me RAID1 isn't suitable for backups, it is suitable for the OP's purpose - "backup for drive failure"

What ´s a raw utils?

I think "rsync" is different.

Backup Utilities

Utility Interface Raw / File
TAR Command line FILE
rsync Command line FILE
dump Command line RAW

http://https://help.ubuntu.com/commu...ckupYourSystem

Clonezilla http://clonezilla.org/ ?