Re: [gentoo-user] Ghosting a Ext3 partition

[Mark Kirkwood <markir@paradise.net.nz>]

Jonathan Haws wrote:
> On Sunday March 2 2008 16:43, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>   
>> Right - what you intend the backup to protect against drives all this
>> sort of stuff.
>>     
>
> The thing that is driving my backups is a hard disk failure.  Hence I was 
> using Ghost instead of something else so I can backup the entire drive and 
> not just a single partition.  That enables the quickest recovery of the 
> entire system in the event of a failure.
>
> I have looked everywhere I can think of to find a tool that is similar to 
> Ghost that will backup the entire hard drive to an image that I can put to 
> DVD, without including free blocks on the disk (I don't want an 80GB image of 
> an 80GB drive when only 5GB are in use at the time).  Does anyone know of a 
> tool capable of this that runs on Linux and has FULL Linux fs support?
>
>   
I actually think that 'dump' will do what you want... provided you can 
choose a time when the machine is not busy (should be easy if it's your 
desktop!). You have to do 1 dump per filesystem, but many desktop 
installations only consist of / (+ maybe /boot) anyway. Also dump of a 
80Gb system that only uses 5Gb will produce a 5Gb image.... Also it can 
do incremental an cumulative backups.

Some friends of mine use Amanda to backup their (Redhat/Centos) servers, 
that may worth looking at too.

Cheers

Mark
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