On Wednesday 24 February 2010 22:18:19 Antonio Olivares wrote: > I have a copy of SystemRescueCD, GpartedLiveCD, in case either of the two > are handy in this situation. I have run rawhide and have been lucky to > get back up from those BAD UPDATES once in a while and the test list is > very generous with their help and guidance. Hello Antonio, I've been using partimage for some years now without a single problem thru the SystemRescueCd. I've used it for ext3 and ntfs as well. I think Fedora 12 is the last version where I'll use it because partimage doesn't support ext4 (lucky I was that I chose ext3 for my root filesystem during F12 installation so I still can use it)...so... if you are already running F12 and you are using ext4 for your root filesystem forget about "partimage" and try out "partclone" which may or may not be on the SystemRescueCD. Here's the website: http://partclone.org/index.php On the other hand, Clonezilla is also very popular for creating images. It is more powerful (lots of options) and it can backup/restore images to & from the network easily (partimage recently added some network functionality). Clonezilla is used mainly thru its menu-driven interface, so, for anyone without much command-line experience it may be less frightening. However, you still need to know what you are doing! Clonezilla may be overkill for personal use I think... Going back to partimage (or partclone which is similar) you basically need to know well your partitions (where is your root filesystem located etc) so basically when you boot with one of these LiveCD's the first thing you do is an "fdisk -l" to list the partitions. Once you identify your root filesystem, the next thing you need to find out is WHERE do you want to place your backup image. I usually have one partition on another disk just for this but if you don't have any other disk you may as well use any partition on your existing disk (you can throw the image on your /home partition perhaps...). You can also use any external USB drive to place the image file etc... The nice thing about these imaging tools is that they're filesystem-aware. That is, they will only copy the used bits on the filesystem. Let say you have a 10GB root filesystem but you are only using 2GB out of it.... The resulting image file will be just 2GB. This is just another reason why it's wiser to have a separate partition for /home. Imagine you just had a single partition for the / filesystem...and that you had around 40Gb in docs, music, videos under /home.... Since your personal data is under the "home" directory within the / filesystem... whenever you perform an image backup of your root filesystem you'll be backing up ALL your personal files as well(40GB +) when you only had the intention of backing up your SYSTEM files in order to revert it back in case of problems with the updates. So, as you can see, in order to start into this "imaging" thing...it's essential that you have a separate partition for your personal data and for your system data. That way, you can use any of these imaging tools to do backups and restores quickly.. Of course, I'm assuming you already have a daily backup plan for your /home data (with rsync , cp etc...). On the specifics (tutorials) you can do a Google search and you'll find plenty. Feel free to ask here if there's anything specific you don't understand. All the best, Jorge -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
