I’m getting a laptop ready for Natalie to borrow to take with her family to Charlotte for her sister Valerie’s graduation.
To help keep Natalie’s younger sister Hilary entertained, they are going to take lots of movies to watch on the way.
I’m not sure if I am going to need the information that’s on this system again later, so I’m going to make a quick backup with partimage. I was going to use mondo, another cool program, but couldn’t find LiveCD with it compiled in.
To start, first download the CD image from the website at http://www.sysresccd.org/. Then make sure the target computer’s BIOS is set to boot from CD.
I’m going to use a network share to store the image, so I need to get networking going. My network uses DHCP, so getting connected is easy.
root@sysresccd /root % dhclient eth0
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.1.0-Gentoo
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/Listening on LPF/eth0/00:20:e0:6d:34:35
Sending on LPF/eth0/00:20:e0:6d:34:35
Sending on Socket/fallback
option_space_encapsulate: option space agent does not exist, but is configured.
DHCPREQUEST on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK from 192.168.1.1
bound to 192.168.1.129 — renewal in 2934 seconds.
root@sysresccd /root %
Next, I mount a remote samba share with mount. This is where the backup image will be created.
root@sysresccd /root % mount -o username=qmr -t smbfs //192.168.1.3/incoming mnt
Password:
root@sysresccd /root %
Now, it’s time to start up partimage. A step by step wizard takes you through all the choices you need to make. It’s very straightforward and intuitive.
I select the appropriate hard disk and partition (there’s only one to choose from!), then name the backup file.
On the next screen, I elect to use no compression, since this should get the job done the fastest. If I want to save space later, I can gzip or bzip2 the backup. I also set the program to split the image at 4400MiB, for convenient archiving to DVD-R if needed.
This last screen optionally lets one enter a description for the backup.
NTFS support is experimental.. that’s ok, I like to live dangerously.
After showing some stats about the NTFS partition, partimage starts the backup. I’m backing up over a 100mbit network link. The network speed is the bottleneck here. Total size is 8gb, it should take about an hour to complete. Doing the backup over gigabit ethernet or to another hard disk would be faster.
That’s it!
Thanks for this it looks much more concise than other utilities I have seen. What I would like is something to backup specific settings in Ubuntu and have them either restored or integrated into the installation to have everything set the way I want. Good post chief.
Kevin
All settings are kept in your home directory in “dotfiles”. Anything that starts with a ‘.’ is a hidden file on Unix. Just copy the dotfiles from your home directory into the new installation.
Also, /etc/skel is is a set of files and directories that is copied into the home directory of any new user account you create.
You could also just make a tarball of the directories you want to save / restore.
That sounds alot like my business plan from last year dude!