Topic: a possible backup option

[brian MOore]

Greetings all.  would welcome comments on the following:
I want to be able to do a complete backup of my system without finding a tape drive large enough to backup my 4 gb of data on the server.  was thinking of adding another ide hard disk in the machine and backing up my / partition with something like the following:

dd if=/dev/hda6 of=/dev/hdc1/backup.img

IN the event of a system failure, I could do a fresh install and then restore the partition from the image.  don't know if this is a workable solution but figured I would ask for comment.  any tips, ideas on how I am going to get my self in major trouble, etc would be welcome.

thanks.  brian.

[dubois]

You could also use partimage, or norton ghost....(i use ghost)

[Tom Keiser]

There have been comments on this forum that Ghost will create a Linux image, but won't restore it properly. Have you tried a restore?


dubois wrote:
>
> You could also use partimage, or norton ghost....(i use ghost)

[Boris]

Both Ghost and Partimage required restart, "dd" can be used while server is still up, but its _VERY_ slow.
There are threads on this forum about using rsync for this, you may want to search for those.

[brian MOore]

thaat is what prompted this adventure.  I tried all sorts of things with ghost 2002 with no joy.  usually after a restore, got stuck at the lilo prompt or had a kernel panick after restoring from a ghost image.  partimage looks very promissin as an alternative.  will give it a shot and see what comes of it.
brian.
g

[dubois]

hmmm..never tried to restore with ghost.  i too may replace it with partimage