System Backup

[monolith]

Anyone know any good backup programs? like norton ghost but for linux :)

[adolfix]

Mandrakelinux has its own backup sw.

 

Go into the System section of MCC. You will find there the backup icon.

 

You can do backups as you want (manual, automatic, the system only...)

 

Cheers

[pmpatrick]

Partimage is similar to norton ghost but it can't image a mounted partition. It's on the knoppix cd and there are posts on the board that go into detail on its use.

[Guest ChillyWillie]

go to freshmeat.net and search for g4l (Ghost for Linux). I don't know how well it works though. In fact, that's why I came here in the first place...

[sofasurfer]

Partimage is similar to norton ghost but it can't image a mounted partition. It's on the knoppix cd and there are posts on the board that go into detail on its use.

 

Mandrake 10.1.

Is the proceedure that you unmount your partitions, make your backups using partimage from terminal and then remount your partitions from terminal?

 

Using partimage, when reinstalling the whole setup from a backup, is there any configuring required or do you reinstall from backup and it is ready to go?

 

What is it called when you have a copy that boots (is ready to run when you restore) as opposed to a copy that must be configured?

[ianw1974]

A copy that boots would be an "image" or at least how I see it. You load the image, and it works as of the date/time period the image was taken. Of course, if you made any changes to your system since the image was taken, then these would need to be installed/configured to get it back to where it was. But that's the way it is with any backup/imaging.

 

Normal Norton Ghost can image pretty much anything. The problem is that if it cannot natively read the partition, then it will do a sector based copy. That means you will get an image the size of the whole partition, and not of the data. For example, Ghost for Linux is better, because if your partition size is 6GB and you are only using 2GB then this will be in the image and compressed, so maybe you'll end up with an image size of about 1GB - 1.5GB.

 

However, using the normal Windows version, you'll get a 6GB image, because it can't read inside the partition. It is still however, usable, just a pain.

 

Going to your question about partimage. I've never used it, but the system would have to be booted into single user mode to get the partitions you want to have unmounted to image. If you can't unmount it, then you need to boot from a Live CD to be able to take the image.

[RVDowning]

I've used mondo/mindi both under Suse and currenty in Mandriva 2006. Check out the site: http://mondorescue.org/

 

I've done file restores and full restores. You can backup/restore to most anything including networks. You can also restore to bare metal. It really works well.