Quoting Bob S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hello SuSE people, > > I plan to buy an external USB drive for my backups. I would really like to do > a commmplete and full backup. > > Can I make a "clone" of my SUSE 10.3 ? I mean bootable and everything. If > not, > can I copy everything and then boot it from the DVD? Again, if not, and I > just want a backup of everything, must I partition the new drive exactly as > the original drive and rsync the partitions individually? > > I am thinking hard drive failure (could take it out of the enclosure and > replace the failed internal disk with it) as well as file corruption backups. > Used to use Kdar for backups but it isn't supported for 10.3 Was always > worried about a reinstall after a hard drive failure with all of the extra > stuff I have installed. >
For cloning partitions, 'dd' works fine. I suggest downloading and burning SystemRescueCD. It is intended for just this kind of thing (bare metal saves and restores). Also use md5sum on bothe source partition and the copy to check that the copy is good. Or mount the copy on a loop device. For example: mount /mnt/partitions/20071024/hda7.bin /mnt2 -t ext3 -r -o loop=/dev/loop3 (external USB drive is mounted at /mnt, this was on SuSE 10.0 where IDE drives were still hdX. Now I can access the old files at /mnt2 if needed and the act of mount does some kind of rudimentary filesystem check.) Someone has done some testing and found across a wide range of hardware that a blocksize of 8MB gives the best speed. For example: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/mnt/partitions/2007-12-08/sda1 bs=8MB On SuSE 10.0 it made a huge difference. USB access is a lot faster on SuSE 10.3 so it won't make as much a difference. If your filesystem types are supported, you might try partimage. It creates filesystem images, instead of parition images, i.e., no empty space. Works across different source and destination partition sizes. For backup of a single system, I like rsnapshot. It uses rsync and does incremental backups. Rsnapshot is part of SuSE 10.3. I've restored files several times and it is straight forward. HTH, Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
