On Sat, 8 Dec 2007, Bryen wrote:
On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 23:40 -0500, Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people,
I plan to buy an external USB drive for my backups. I would really like to do a commmplete and full backup.
Can I make a "clone" of my SUSE 10.3 ? I mean bootable and everything. If not, can I copy everything and then boot it from the DVD? Again, if not, and I just want a backup of everything, must I partition the new drive exactly as the original drive and rsync the partitions individually?
I am thinking hard drive failure (could take it out of the enclosure and replace the failed internal disk with it) as well as file corruption backups. Used to use Kdar for backups but it isn't supported for 10.3 Was always worried about a reinstall after a hard drive failure with all of the extra stuff I have installed.
Bob S
I'd like to hear what others say about "cloning" methods. But just to stick my two cents in, if you wanted to clone, I would suggest using dd rather than rsync. And then just dd the entire partition by block records.
Depending on what additional options you would want to use, the basic syntax would be: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/WhereverYouAreBackingUpTo/ (where if is your source and of is your destination)
But if you're only interested in data backup, then rsync is probably your best bet.
---Bryen---
I agree. dd will allow you to copy an entire partition block by block. This is good if you are replacing a hard drive and want to keep the partition layout the same. Rsync is better for doing things like incremental backups. I use a home-grown script run from a cron job to do a nightly backup of my home directory to a second hdd on the same machine. It isn't a pretty script (in fact, it's pretty crude) but it does the job that I need it to do. It consists of only one line: rsync --logfile=/var/log/home_backup -Ca /home/<username> /backup/<username>. This just compares each file in /home/<usersname> with its corresponding file in /backup/<username> and copies any that are new or have changed, resetting the archive bit for each file. I also have set up the log file in logrotate so that it rotates the logs and keeps 5 days worth. There are probably plenty of flaws in this backup method (I wouldn't use it in a business situation - I'd write something a little more sophisticated or run a commercial backup solution) but for my needs at home it works fine. I hope this is of some help. -- ====================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV rodney.baker@optusnet.com.au ====================================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org