[SWLUG] Taking a disk image

[Neil Greenwood]

Sorry Justin, I didn't check the headers until I was pressing the send
button, and then it was too late.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Neil Greenwood <neil.greenwood.lug at gmail.com>
Date: 26-Jan-2007 15:40
Subject: Re: [SWLUG] Taking a disk image
To: Justin Mitchell <justin at discordia.org.uk>


On 26/01/07, Justin Mitchell <justin at discordia.org.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 15:01 +0000, Bradley, Peter wrote:
> > But will it back up my Windows XP Pro partition, my two Linux partitions
> > and the boot sector all in one go, such that I can restore from the
> > external medium and then boot from the original hard disk, find grub and
> > see my original OS options and be able to then boot into either?
> >
> > Sorry, I'm not doubting you or anything.  I just want to be totally
> > clear.

Justin's posted solution will back up all partitions and the MBR
(since they're all accessible through the whole disk device).

I'm not exactly sure what will happen if the new disk you restore to
is a different size, since I've never tried it.

No one has mentioned Partition Image yet. It will do gzip or bzip2
compression, and backup over a network (client/server) or to another
device locally. And it's GPL (I think, definitely FOSS). Packages
should be available for most distros.

It currently gives a warning if you use bzip2, since it won't
automatically restore the MBR correctly from a bzip2 image, but you
can just use bunzip2 or bzcat. Curses GUI or command-line.

HTH
Hwyl,
Neil.