On Friday 07 December 2007 11:40:26 pm 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.
Replying to myself here so I can reply to all of the folks who were kind enough to answer my query. Thanks Bryen, Rodney, Carlos, Joe, Otto.. Jeffrey, Billie, etc. Your replies lead to more questions, As I stated previously, I would like to do an "all in one" if possible. Bootable and incrementaly up to date. Will dd build a bootable disk? Can that clone be updated by rsync to make it current? I am not worried about whitespace and I would buy a disk just a little larger than my proposed cloning. It's sole purpose would be for a backup. The whole idea of this exercise would be to have a faithful bootable system until I could replace my failed drive and/or be able to restore from that drive if I had corruption/whatever on the primary drive. Now, suppose I did have a primary drive failure and I used the backup clone to restore to a larger disk. As Carlos pointed out I couldn't use dd to restore because the extra space would then be inaccessible. Could the new primary be partioned first so that it would be? Otto has an intersting solution which I will have to investigate. If it will do incremental backups to the disk that would be perfect. Jeffrey suggests SystemRescueCD but if that is like Mondo and is a one time thing, I don't want that. Don't know anything about rsnapshot. Will that make a bootable replacement drive? Is it just anothe variation of rsync? I know,.....I could use raid to clone and build a replacement drive,, but if I corrupt, delete, whatever it happens to both drives. Any other suggestions advice? Bob S -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org