backup entire system

[Matt Graham]

> On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 12:19 AM, Michael Havens <bmike1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I got things just the way I want them. How do I make a mirror image of my
>> hard drive?

This is usually the wrong way to approach backups.[0]  What if your disk dies,
and you need to restore your stuff onto a disk with a different size?[1] 
You'll have to mount the images loopback and cp everything over, which makes
things less simple than you want.

>> What do you all recommend? You know, on the first page about this
>> one of the programs is partimage and they say that one of the
>> limitations of it is that it does not support ext4

ext4 is still in development.  I can't think of any advantages ext4 would
offer the home user right now.  But what I'd recommend is to just back up the
things that need to be backed up.  It's so easy to install a system and
bootloader now that I'd just back up /home , /usr/local , and possibly /etc . 
That said:  rsync.  rsyncing my ~ to an external USB2 disk takes a couple of
minutes, which is a lot faster than almost anything else I could think of. 
(The initial sync to the blank disk took about an hour, as 110G is kind of a
lot of data.)  And the rsynced disk can be mounted anywhere[2], and its dir
structure is exactly like my ~s, so I can quickly find that copy of
~/junk/importantstuff/ that I mistakenly rm -rf'ed earlier.

From: Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com>
> I would use clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) to make a "initial
> system image" (its really partimage and DD wrapped up in a series of
> easy scripts)

This'll take a whole lot longer than rsyncing things, especially if partimage
doesn't grok ext4 and falls back on dd.  Backups should be as convenient as
possible, so you can do them often without saying "@#$%ing backups take too
long!"  I'd only use partimage for things like NTFS partitions, where not
everything is a file.

Or you could do a hybrid approach:  "fdisk -l /dev/sda >
/mnt/backup/fdisk.txt", use partimage on /boot , and use rsync for the rest of
the partitions.  

[0] Unless you're doing softRAID-1, which isn't a backup plan, but an "in case
of disk failure" plan.
[1] Even disks that are the same size can have different C/H/S geometries,
though this is a lot less common than it used to be.
[2] So long as you have a Linux box.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see