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Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE people
Just got me a new WD Passport external USB haard drive. (present from my great kids) Planning on using it for backups of my several OS's.
Blew away the Windoze stuff and reformatted it into 4 ext3 primary partitions. (250GB - actually 232GB) Good move? Bad move?
Excellent move, works well with usb flash drives too.
Now the question: If I do an rsync backup of the whole OS onto one of these new partitions, (10.3 for example) will rsync preserve everything? Like partitions and folders etc,? Never used rsync before.
If so, could I blow away the original OS and restore it completely to a working condition?
As Ken said, rsync is for files, not partitions. (It is Fantastic for that, not only for local files, but for remote backups as well) Others will have to chime in on the partition backup to usb scheme. Using "dd" comes to mind with some way to reinstall the mbr and boot loader, but I am not near smart enough there to help.
Any good how-tos on rsync? Sorry about my ignorance.
rsync is the swiss army knife of file backup. For help: http://rsync.samba.org/ google "rsync howto" google "rsync examples" Just remember two things: (1) slashes are important! (a) rsync /folder1/folder2/ /tosome/newfolder Copies the *contents* of folder2 to newfolder (i.e. result newfolder/*.*) (b) rsync /folder1/folder2 /tosome/newfolder Copies *folder2* to newfolder (i.e. result: newfolder/folder2) (2) when using rsync --files-from .... ... -r (recursive) is not implied! The rest of rsync will fall into place as you learn it -- without any surprises. Tip - For unattended password-less remote backup create ssl-certificates and rsync will do the rest.
Bob S
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