[TriLUG] Linux Backup and Restore to totally wiped partition

Brian lugmail at cheetah.dynip.com
Tue Feb 26 11:52:11 EST 2013


I'm surprised no one has mentioned dd.  It's not exactly a turn-key 
solution, but I use it with great success to manage images and snapshots 
of varios OSes on a couple different machines:

At home, I have a system with a 60GB SSD boot drive and a terabyte of 
RAID-5 storage.  I boot up with a recent Knoppix in console mode (boot: 
knoppix 2) to take and restore snapshots to the SSD, and it works like a 
champ.  I often alternate between Debian and Win7 that way.

At work, we have a system with a 120GB SSD boot drive with four 
roughly-equal partitions, each a different flavor of Windows, on which 
we do testing of the software we write.  A separate Linux partition with 
scads of storage is used, again with dd, to take and restore snapshots 
of the partitions (and a separate backup of the MBR is kept for 
emergencies as well).  Works wonderfully.

Another potential advantage to the dd approach is, if you don't compress 
the images, you can mount them directly using the loopback device.  This 
could be useful if you realize you want to make a tweak to a config file 
without taking a new snapshot.

Anyhoo, there's my $0.02.

Oh, an aside: g4u (http://www.feyrer.de/g4u) offers a semi-automated 
approach to dd and netcat, and can save images to an FTP (or NFS I 
think, been a while) target.  It includes gzip in the pipeline as well; 
slower processing but much more compact images (especially if 
unallocated space is zeroed out).

~Brian

On 2/26/2013 11:34 AM, Tarus Balog wrote:
> On 02/25/2013 06:51 PM, Matt Pusateri wrote:
>> What about running them in a VM and then rolling back to snapshots?
>
> We run graphic desktops of Ubuntu. My understanding is that I can't get
> the graphics in 12.04 LTS to run under a VM (kvm would be my option I
> would assume).
>
> Please correct me if I am wrong. It would be great to generate a single
> VM image and just distribute it.
>
> -T
>




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