How to backup and restore your netbook Having a small-capacity solid-state drive in your netbook may be limitation but it has one advantage: it's easy to back up. We don't mean copying a few files over to a safe place, but duplicating the entire drive, operating system and all, ready to drop it all back on if the worst comes to the worst. PCs often come with …
PING works nicely from a partitioned USB stick. You have the PING bootimage on a small partition (the ISO being transferred using UNetbootin). It will then happily save your backups on the remainder of the stick.
The advantage of this approach is that you can restore from a single device. And you can always copy your backups to other media for backup/storage...
Identify the location of your system HD in this example lets use /dev/sda and lets say we plugged in a external USB drive/stick at /media/disk
open a terminal (OMGZ..he said TERMINAL) and enter:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/disk/image.img
To restore it ...
dd if=/media/disk/image.img of=/dev/sda
I don't normally comment on guides like these as they are written with a novice in mind, but I do feel that 'dd' can do a far simpler job and really isn't a complicated command to jot down (if you can't remember it). Its also far, far easier than the umpteen menu's covering 4 pages in the article.
A very nice and easy write can be found at:
http://www.backuphowto.info/linux-backup-hard-disk-clone-dd
Quick and simple backups get done, slow, confusing or time consuming ones don't in my experience.
I use partimage from SystemRescueCD, booted from a usb stick rather than a CD (which is more than a little inconvenient on a netbook). You need to fsck the unmounted system partition before you try and back it up for linux netbooks, and chkdsk it if it's XP, otherwise you'll get errors if you've actually used the thing much.
Try using that on a running system for real...
My moneys on an image file that is junk as you will be imaging a file system that is mounted Read/Write and has lots of data still cached in the kernel.
Also I would like to see you do the restore as well DD'ing over the top of a live file system sounds like an absolutely brilliant idea.
My experience with PING is that: a) on a drive with errors, the backup may not complete, and b) it sometimes is unable to restore the saved image. The restore process will look like it completes, but the restored disk will be unusable.
A significantly complicating factor is that Windows XP installations tend to become corrupt as a computer slowly dies, making it hard to determine if the problem is software or hardware or both. Additionally, I'm not convinced backing up and restoring a computer with potentially defective hardware is even a good idea. Specifically, I suspect that PING assumes that it is running on perfect hardware. When confronted with old and potentially defective hardware, it does not implement sufficient error checking and recovery code to deal with random small data errors. Once a few of these errors occur, the backup becomes unusable.
But isn't this sort of jobby something that linux live CDs were supposed to cover?
At least that way you get a full functioning system with internet capability for help etc - especially if the restore has failed. I believe Fedora and/or Ubuntu can be USB stick installations.
That'll work. You can also use nc (netcat) as well
http://tuxnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/07/backing-up-disk-over-network.html
@Tom
This is why you boot from a live CD or USB key to do the backup. I doubt anyone was suggesting that you can use DD to backup a running filesystem.
Paris, cuz I'd backup her system anyday
booting from a USB stick is what I also use. My version of SystemRescueCD (v. 1.1.0, but
shouldn't it be called SystemRescueUSB?) has trouble with my eee901's ethernet, so I have
no network connection (no backing up straight to my desktop machine). I am forced to use
USB sticks for backup, but it all works very smoothly.
AlxUnder
As pointed out with varying levels of politeness above dd should be run from a boot cd/usb stick and not from a live running OS. When I had used it previously it was from a USB stick as that was what I was told to do, the link I posted above didn't state that so I didn't either on this occasion,
I was aware running it on a live system wasn't ideal, but equally I didn't realise it was so diabolically bad as people have suggested. Lesson learned and all that.
This is precisely why I mentioned in my original comment that I don't normally comment on these kinds of guides, I'm not a linux guru nor a journalist.
@Tom ... A little less venom in your replies might be helpful rather than coming over as a complete righteous nob.
Paris because someone needs some love.
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