Recently I tried to make a snapshot backup (mirroring, cloning) of my 1GB debian installation partition. For that purpose I prepared an empty 2GB LINUX partition on my external FireWire drive. Within MacOS X and having Ext2FS_1.0a3 installed I first cloned my installation to the FireWire partition with CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner, by Mike Bombich). That took me about 2,5 hours. My intention was to update this snapshot from time to time with the rsync -av --delete command in MacOS X. So I used rsync after CCC. When I booted into the cloned snapshot, the system was able to boot and I could use kde as normal. But I think some of the symbolic or hard links were broken. So I don't think the installation was really cloned and usable for a back-cloning.
What is you recommendation of such an approach? I also thought of an rsync within debian. But to be able to do this I need PCMCIA support on my Wallstreet G3 (for my FireWire PCMCIA card) and FireWire support and function, which I still couldn't get to work. I also would prefer to do the backup within MacOS X as it is my main working area. I use woody with the 2.4.21ben2 kernel.
