LAS said:
This sounds so "Linux" based. Can't I use any CD(s???) with an external
drive? How many CD's would I need to backup my whole system? I really,
really like the idea of backing up my whole system, but I suspect there may
be assumptions in your response that a luddite like myself isn't picking up.
You're perfectly free to use commercial software. I'm a cheap skate,
which is why my solutions don't cost money (for the software). Visit
the Acronis site, or using your search engine, look for terms like
"bare metal recovery" so you get the right kind of backup software.
Bare metal recovery means, even if your boot drive is erased, you're
supposed to be able to put your computer back together again.
You can even get certain versions of Acronis for free. For example,
say you buy a Seagate hard drive. Seagate has backup/transfer software
available for download from their web site. It likely checks, to see
that at least one of the hard drives involved is a Seagate drive.
A user manual is also available for download, and the Acronis brand
is mentioned in there. A reason I might not push this solution,
is reading the manual to find a sector by sector backup option,
might take me half an hour of reading. The manual is thick, like
all backup manuals. I hate stuff like that. With dd, I do
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
as a minimal command from a Linux terminal window as root, and I can
go make coffee. Additional work and parameters are needed, to enhance
transfer rate. The bare command does 13MB/sec, and if you provide
block size and block count parameters, the transfer rate jumps to
about 3x that amount (and with USB2 hard drives, the USB2 cable
is the limit, at 30MB/sec).
Some would ask "why don't you do file by file backup" ? I'm
a simple guy, and that one command above, captures everything
visible on the disk. I get a copy of the MBR, a copy of the
63 sector area that might be hiding a grub boot loader, a
copy of dynamic disk parameters hiding up near the end of the
disk and so on. Sure, a commercial backup program may capture
all the information as well, and, in a more efficient way,
beating my solution hands down. I like the simplicity of my
solution. I *do* have to read the manual page for dd, to
understand how it works, but it's pretty simple after that.
If you enjoy backup manuals, well, that's OK too. I remember
buying a copy of Retrospect years ago, and it took me two days
of solid reading and experimenting, before I got my first
backup done. That included, scripting all the partitions
(20 of them), so they'd get done in one shot. I let it go,
came back much later, and two out of twenty backups failed.
Meaning, I couldn't even trust it to complete the job on its
own. And I really liked Retrospect, because you could
open an archive, and get at individual files. There was
a fair time investment, to understand it. And more time
wasted, figuring out why two of the twenty backups failed.
The two things that will stop "dd" are disk errors, and
running out of space. Otherwise, I can go make coffee.
There are a ton of backup programs out there. In fact,
some of the external hard drives you can buy, have a
backup program stored on the drive when you take it out
of its box.
Paul
