Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 14:57:35 -0800 From: Michael Perry Message-ID: <20001126145735.A18072@tsoft.com> Subject: Re: [SLE] Lazy question: how to make partition image? Quoting Corvin Russell on Sun, Nov 26, 2000 at 04:36:18PM -0500:

I don't know if what I want to do is possible, but here it is. I want to remove my two Windows partitions entirely, as I never visit Windows anymore. OTOH, on the off chance that I want to restore Windows without reconfiguring, downloading all system updates etc., I would like to make a copy of the partition images, such that I could simply copy them back to the partitions again. Now, each partition is 1G, and neither contains more than a CD's worth of data, though of course i don't know how it is distributed. Can I make an image and burn it to CD? Can I make a compressed image and burn it to CD? Is there an alternative way of going about it that doesn't involve making an image? I'm borrowing a friend's burner, so this explains in part my lack of knowledge; I don't do a lot of this stuff.

TIA.

Best,

Corvin

I do rsync for this. I take my son's computer, boot to a linux prompt using a certain utility like tomsrtboot that can be easily modified and do a rsync to a linux box I have with twin 47g seagate drives in it. The image has also been restored a few times when my son decided to install directx or some other foolishness which wiped his registry clean or damaged it. Rsync is completely indifferent to what it finds to backup. The other thing about rsync'ing linux systems is that the file system lives so making changes to a rsync'ed master image is pretty easy. Another way, is to use something like drive image pro. I did this for a certain large OEM client and was stung by its rather strange support for Linux swap partitions. There are perhaps even other ways like ghost. If you use ghost, you can build an image file and move it to another media. If Linux can read the file system it can back it up. If you have the windows box on the network, you can also use arkeia for free and download a windows client and setup a tape drive as the server and then back up the box over a tcpip network. We do this at work also. Our main approach (and we do a lot of imaging and backing up and restoring) is rsync. Its fast, open source, and I know who wrote it :) -- Michael Perry mperry@tsoft.com ------------------