backing up an entire hard drive

[tho.mei]

Hallo

@stevea

tho.mei has a bad habit of teling people to do someting else, rather than answering their questions.

Sure, your explanations are relay good! But I'm not sure if they are useful for a newbe. I don't like to correct you. There are may ways. But to much is a "bad habit" as well.

tayy wrote:

Is there any package that allows you to make a complete image of your filesystem à la norton ghost that can be restored? Or is there already such a function in fedora that I am unaware of? Thanks in advance.

Imagen if I would advice advice you: dd if=/dev/sha1 of=/mnt/sda2/diskimage Something like this would be the "correct" answer. On a windowz systems you would do something like this.

I ask my self all aways, what will help most. And I like to tell the easiest way. Example: It is not very easy for a newbe to restore grub and exactly the same disk layout. The installer is the much easier way. A user and admins likes to restore a system that works exactly the same. But if / is on /dev/sda1 or on /dev/sda5 doesn't matter. I talk about normal use. This is just an example.

You are doing a excellent job in explaining all details unasked. No problem for my. But it is not rely kind to tell it a "bad habit", to offer help. This is a forum and not a guideline. It is the great thing of a forum to get different views.

Marry x-mas.

[PilotJLR]

I agree about the benefit of differing views! It's a good way to learn.

But if we are talking ease of use... images (and g4l and similar tools) are far and away the simplest. Forget about installing grub and partitioning...
I simply boot a g4l cd, enter my ftp server credentials and address, then select the image I want and choose "Restore." That's it... come back in 45 minutes to a brand new disc image. It's wonderful.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by tho.mei

Hallo

@steveaSure, your explanations are relay good! But I'm not sure if they are useful for a newbe. I don't like to correct you. There are may ways. But to much is a "bad habit" as well.

People are only NEWBIES as long as you keep then in the dark. I don't believe in leaving people in the dark. If you want to live in the dark run Windows.

When someone asks, "how do I do XXX ?" I do think it is important to answer that EXACT question. You, Tho.Mei, and I do not understand all the reasons why someone may want to do XXX. Yes it is very useful to point out that many times an alternative is more practical, but perhaps that alternative is not useful to the poster.

When someone asks how to back up an entire disk system and YOU answer that it you don't want a full backup; then you are making an illogical assumption. I would think that anyone with a technical background such as Tho.Mei would understand how poorly we are served by loose assumptions. Perhaps the person may need to do a rebuild without access to the install DVD or the internet. Perhaps they want to make exact install copies for virtualization or for to install on multiple identical disks for performance tests right down to the same package revs and UUID. YOU don't know why the person wants to backup the full system, so don't make rash assumptions.

Originally Posted by tho.mei

I ask my self all aways, what will help most. And I like to tell the easiest way.

You tell them the answer to a different question. That *may* be the question they should have asked, but maybe not.

You are doing a excellent job in explaining all details unasked. No problem for my. But it is not rely kind to tell it a "bad habit", to offer help. This is a forum and not a guideline. It is the great thing of a forum to get different views.

No ! I am answering the question that was asked, and you are answering a different simpler question.

Here is another example:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=176332

Someone posts there is a problem with pirut, and tho.mei tells them to use yumex instead. This doesn't solve any problem. It is a classic "workaround" and not a solution. Many thousands use pirut; it is not fundamentally broken. Instead of fixing or at least identifying the problem he is told to switch tools needlessly. A constructive solution is to fix the config or install so it works, or else determine why it doesn't work and post the bug to bugzilla. We ARE responsible for reporting bugs if we ever want any FOSS code to improve. What should this user do when he finds a bug in yumex ? Switch to a third then fourth then fifth package manager ? Nonsense !

No hard feeling Tho.Mei - you seem to offer more constructive answers than many, but I think you are capable of answering the original question AND offering possible alternatives.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by PilotJLR

I agree about the benefit of differing views! It's a good way to learn.

But if we are talking ease of use... images (and g4l and similar tools) are far and away the simplest. Forget about installing grub and partitioning...
I simply boot a g4l cd, enter my ftp server credentials and address, then select the image I want and choose "Restore." That's it... come back in 45 minutes to a brand new disc image. It's wonderful.

I haven't used g4l, it sounds nice. Could you explain exactly what it backs up ?

Just files ?
Full partitions (including file system detail) ?
Apparently not the full disk image including grub !

I would also like to know if it backs up ACLs and posix CAPABILITIES as well as SELinux contexts.

Sadly backup is not a trivial matter, nor simply explained.

[PilotJLR]

Yes, it is a full disk image, including grub.

g4l is basically a simple and easy front end to dd on a livecd. You can backup either partitions, or entire disks. Of course, it is much simpler to backup the whole disk, which also takes the MBR. You can use compression to minimize the hit from empty space.

Since it is a bit-level image backup, it preserves everything - ACL, attributes, etc. It has no awareness of any of these things... which is fine. It's a bit level backup, so it operates at a lower level than filesystem and file.
To reiterate, it backs up EVERYTHING. :-)

[thesun]

Can I jump in and ask a somewhat different question: are there any simple, clean, command-line or GUI programs that will backup a directory to a set of DVDs? For example, if I wanted to have a "photo" of my home directory as of today, is there a tidy way to split it into 4.7GB chunks that can be burned in sequence? Or (even better!) a program that will pop open the platter and ask for a new DVD-R until the job is done? I'm running FC5 and plan to upgrade to FC8 and shift my partitions around, so I need a good solid backup that's off the hard disk if anything goes wrong. I already have a backup onto a separate physical hard disk (just cp -r /home/myhome) but in case something goes haywire I want to have another separate copy.

Anyone else in a similar boat? Anyone have some good suggestions? It looks like "backup" (the command line tool) might be good...anyone know of others?

(I'll also say, regarding the earlier tiff between the two posters, that your info is useful and you're both kind of right -- it's always nice to have the question actually answered, but then again it's always nice to have someone toss out an idea that works for them and perhaps it'll work for you. This was a great thread to read and I learned a lot from it. I've found the backing up of certain directories to be a disaster most of the time. It was nice to discover there's a yum.log (didn't know that!) and to see what others out there are doing. I don't think anyone who posted was doing anything other than try to be helpful. Either way, this was a good informative thread with a lot of good suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to post...and the issue of who's right or who's answering best doesn't really matter. What matters is you both (everyone) spent time and put energy into helping someone out in the cyber-blue. So kudos all around.)