On Friday 16 November 2007 09:23:24 am Bill Davidsen wrote: > Ralph De Witt wrote: > > Hi All: > > I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 Computer with a 80 gig hard drive. I also > > have a Western Digital 500 gig My Book External USB Hard Drive attached. > > I would like to Back up the entire hard drive to a partition on the > > external drive. I have very little knowledge of how to do this. I have > > always backed up to a CD individual files after a data loss. I thought a > > auto backup routine would work, but the computer may not be on when the > > backup would be scheduled, and the external hard drive partition do not > > seem to want to auto mount so that would not work. I am using the kde > > desk top. Could some one add to my knowledge and help me out? TIA > > If you want to make a backup of the physical hard drive, such that you > could just replace the drive with an identical drive and recreate it, > you need to boot from a CD, such as the Fedora rescue CD, and just copy > the contents. Assuming that the external drive is sdb, mounted on > /mnt/external (for example): > dd if=/dev/sda bs-1M | gzip -3 >/mnt/external/2007-10-04-1410-image.gz > > Note that the image must be restored to an identical hard drive, since > it's an image of the whole disk. It might work on a larger drive, but > you might not use, or even have access to, the whole drive. > > There are various utilities to do this, g4u being popular. This has some > of the same limitations, but is easy to use. Because it's based on > netBSD (AFAIK) the drivers are not identical, but it can backup over a > network using ftp. > > There are commercial products which do this, use Google, I haven't used > any in several years and can't suggest. > > Finally, you can backup the contents of the critical data (or all files) > using programs like rsync, or using tar, cpio, or star. These require > manual partitioning of a replacement drive, restore, and rerunning grub > by hand, but offer more flexibility. > > You can also put an incremental backup program call in your shutdown > sequence, to be sure you back up anything you have done in a current > session. > > Hope that's a useful overview of the possibilities, I'm not sure just > what features you need, and there's always a tradeoff between > convenience of restoring a single lost file and that of restoring > everything. > > -- > Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> > "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from > the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot Bill and Robert: Thanks for your reply's. I have limited knowledge in this area having only copied files to cd after a loss of data. Was thinking along the lines of a whole disk image, with some sort of daily/weekly update to it. How ever if and when this drive dies I would replace with a larger one, so that is a problem. Perhaps the best solution is to use Kbackup from root and do the whole drive weekly. It makes a date/timed 4.5 GB tar file of my Hard Drive as I have 77 GB allocated, I could have several of these for restoring. Again thank you for your help. -- Yours, Ralph. It said Use Windows XP or better, so I installed Kubuntu 7.10 Register Linux User 168814 ICQ #49993234 AIM & Yahoo ralphfdewitt jabber.org ralphdewitt GPG Public Key available at http://www.keyserver.net Key id = 3097 3BC4 Kernel version 2.6.23.1-49.fc8 Current Linux uptime: 3:49, days user hours minutes.
