Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
Quoting Philippe Landau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
What can a simple user use to backup his installation ?
External USB,eSATA,Firewire hard disk. Use System Rescue CD and dd to copy
entire partitions to hard disk. This is for bare metal restore. Use
Why would you want a byte-by-byte copy of the raw disk or any of
it's partitions? That ends up including unused/deallocated blocks.
Any rational backup system requires is only that which resides
in files, and the overall directory structure, not blocks which
are currently NOT allocated to any file or directory.
For this purpose, dump, which writes to a raw device, is FAR
better than dd. For one thing, you can restore individual
files, and if you do a complete restore, you can just mkfs
the filesystem, and when you restore, you have a nice, tight
and totally unfragmented filesystem.
dd allows none of this.
dump is made for backups -- doing what a backup needs to do,
which is to make LOGICAL images of the data.
dd is made for making exact (not logical) images, which is
really NOT desirable for most system restores.
rsnapshot (which uses rsync) for daily/weekly/monthly/etc. backups. Before you
do a clean install or maybe even an update, be sure to do another copy with dd
of the overwritten partitions to the external hard drive.
Note: partition copies can be mounted with the loop devices so you can get at
the files on them. Unless you are backing up everything with the daily
backups, you will find that something needed is not backed up.
Of course, if the filesystem gets hosed, then you might not
be able to read the file with the loopback filesystem in it....
Oh, and check those partition backups with md5sum or by mounting them on a
loop device and running the file system check on them, e.g. e2fschk.
HTH,
Jeffrey
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