On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 06:38, Ron Daniel wrote: > Great. Here I sit, stuck in the world of M$ writing this email cause I > just upgraded to 9.1 Somebody should have told me about the descent > (downgrade) on the other side.
The first three times I tried to install Debian (Redhat and SuSE before) I failed. It was frustrating, but each time I learned some more from exposure, and I've ultimately succeeded. Now I expect such each time I try something new, and I'm prepared for it. I have a laptop too, and I would like to recommend an approach I use (it works with desktop systems too). I have a Thinkpad, and a carrier that goes in the replaceable drive bay (they call it the Ultrabay). I also bought a second hard drive, identical to the one that came with it. My standard backup is: 1) Boot on Tom's rootboot disk (so the main OS and it's files are not involved in the process). 2) "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=16384k". This makes a complete image of the hard disk to the backup disk. (Note: I actually use "date; dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdc bs=16384k; date" so I can time it.) 3) Go to bed. (My 20G drive takes 2 hours and 40 minutes) If something goes wrong otherwise, I can physically swap the disks and be up and running right back where I was. I can experiment with a new distro or upgrade, and guarantee access to my old system within minutes. I can do it selectively: "dd if=/dev/hda7 of=/dev/hdc7 bs=xxxxx" to just backup my /home partition so I have up-to-the-minute copies of my emails or the changes to my VMware images. The value in "bs=xxx" doesn't seem to affect the time it takes to do the backup. The main approach even copies the partition info, which I periodically juggle with PartitionMagic as I tune my system (and slowly but steadily shrink the Window$ partitions). Occasionally I use "cp -au whatever wherever" to just update some of the files quickly. I think rsync does this too, but I haven't looked into it yet. Only dd gets the partition info and bootloader across. I don't know of anything that can cost-effectively back up a 40G HD besides another 40G HD. And that "2 minute swap drives and be in business again" aspect is good for my digestion and blood pressure. You could split a drive in two as well and use this technique, but then a restore would require reversing the dd, so you lose the 2 minute restore aspect. Cheers, Bret -- bwaldow at alum.mit.edu -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
