best way to make a image and Restore

[glda19]

Hi

I have a hd with windows partion and in the extend partion is suse 11.2 installed -+30 GB -+1,4 Swap and to ext4 partion. And aslo 40 GB ntfs.

What is the best way to make a image of the linux partion.
Is clonezilla a good program ?
I tried the following.
I make a image of the two ext4 partions.
Removed the partions. But then clonnezilla don't recognize the free space.
So i have to make first the 2 to partions. Is this necessary?

Glenn

[oz]

What is the best way to make a image of the linux partion.
Is clonezilla a good program ?

I personally like to use FSArchiver to create system archives, but yes, Clonezilla is a very good program and I've found that it works very well. Note that when using FSArchiver, you do have to restore the MBR in a separate process if you restore the archive to fresh hard drive.

Other backup/recovery options can be found here:

Backup & Recovery | Linux App Finder

Previously, I used the bootable CD version of Acronis True Image, which is Linux based, but it's not free software and you need a license to download the bootable ISO.

[eionmac]

[QUOTE
Previously, I used the bootable CD version of Acronis True Image, which is Linux based, but it's not free software and you need a license to download the bootable ISO.[/QUOTE]

This can also be done by MS Windows recovery Paragon Software (Linux based) and they issue old free editions as magazine 'adverts'. Load on Windows system burn recovery CD (which is a Linux program) use CD to back up any partition or all hard disc as an arc file on an external USB hard disc.
regards
eionmac

[MikeH30]

I swear by Clonezilla. I use Clonezilla before I run any updates. It has saved me many hours of re-installing an OS.

[voidpointer69]

Just a note on clonezilla. I use it to clone discs and it's just fine.

However, be aware of something. If you ever need the clone you make to be restored to another disc because, say, your original dropped a head, then you may encounter booting problems if you are addressing the disc "/dev/disk/by-id/..."

I recommend that, before you clone, change device.map and menu.lst in the /boot/grub directory to use "/dev/sda" type entries rather than the "disk/by-id".

That way, when you boot from the restored clone, you wont run into the error caused by grub not being able to find the original disc's Id.

You can always revert back to the original after the clone has been made.

One more thing though, don't propogate the change (to /dev/sda...) into /etc/fstab. I had done so and recentlty tried an upgrade of 11.2 to 11.3. The upgrade failed because it did not want to work with /dev/sda.. etc in fstab.

Cheers - VP

[D-cat]

I'm old skool. This is what I do for partitions with boot code. Boot with live cd (like PartEd Magic), mount backup drive or network partition, then in a terminal:

mount the drive to be backed up
go to that drive
execute dd if=/dev/zero of=zero.fil bs=1M
that will clear the free space (good for compression). You may need to do this several times for FAT partitions.
rm zero.fil to free the space back up.
cd to the backup drive
umount drive to back up

cat /dev/hda1 | gzip -9 | split -db 999M /mnt/drive/backup.gz.

I choose 999M so I can transfer backups to DVD, but you can do whatever.
substitute hda1 with the partition you want to back up.
you can also use bzip2 -9 for better compression, but it is considerably slower.
This method doesn't deal well with restoring to smaller than original partitions, or significantly larger for that matter, as tends to be the case with image backups.

For data drive/partition (e.g. /home) backups I use DAR, just seems to make more sense, none of the image backup restrictions.

Oh, and dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr.bin bs=512 count=1 will back up your master boot record code and partition table.
---
Edit: Restoring:

For image:
cat backup.gz.* | gunzip > /dev/hda1

for MBR
dd if=mbr.bin of=/dev/hda