Hi Hans,
Am 07.05.2026 um 10:33 schrieb Hans:
Hi folks,
just a question: Is there a tool in debian, which can create partition images
of mounted harddrives?
as you write -- in theory there are. However, the only way such images
can be guaranteed to be consistent is by doing them from an unmounted
file system, which is not what you want.
Image backups all suffer from this problem, you can do a lot, but
there's only very few approaches that get close to constency in most
cases. They usually require specific file systems or even very special
kernel support and are, in general, misleading or just harmful.
I searched, but those I found, are all requesting to create from unmounted
devices. Looks like dd is promising, bur partclone, clonezilla, parted and so
on are all want an unmounted system.
Please note, my aim is not getting the simple data (thus I could easily use
rsync), but want a full backup with partitions creating from a running system
(like clonezilla does). This system may not be shut down!
You should give up that idea. For virtual machines you can have
something that can get very close, but even then, some in-VM support is
needed.
The question is: Does such a tool technically exist at all and is that, what I
want, technicalyl possible a all?
I'd say no.
I saw a similar tool for Windows years ago (I bleive it was "AMANDA"),which
Acronis, perhaps.
I would recommend to not try it, but I'm biased.
could do this within a running Windows. But Windows is not linux, so maybe
this could npot be compared.
Indeed it is not. On Windows, solutions allowing usable image backups do
exist, but they would still not create full disk images with everything.
(Please excuse, if my question sounds dumb).
Thanks for your thoughtfulness and a short advice.
If you extend the idea to RAID, ZFS or btrfs spanning several disks, or
layered file systems the whole thing gets even messier, by the way.
Good backups (which is what I'm doing most of my working days) are
surprisingly tricky and, on Unix and Linux systems, usually do not
involve disk images, rarely use partition images, some times use file
system dumps, and most of the time, for good reasons, work at the file
level.
If you describe your goal, not the method, there may be sustainable
solutions someone can provide.
Cheers,
Arno
Best
Hans
--
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
