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optilude
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Joined: 29 May 2002
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Location: England
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 Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 10:23 pm Post subject: Backup to external disk - ghosting or copying? |
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Hi,
I've just bought a 250Gb USB 2 disk. I've got a 25Gb Gentoo partition (+ swap) and a 25Gb Windows partition (which I may shrink to 10Gb at some point, since it's not used much), and a 25Gb "data" partition for documents and music. I want to have a solid backup solution that's not too intrusive. Currently, I burn backups to DVD-RAM, but it takes forever (slow burner) and as a result it doesn't get done as often as it should. My options are thus:
o Ghosting using something like G4U or Partimage - if anyone's got experience with this, I'd be very happy to hear about it. I have a few questions about how they work:
-> They require booting from CD, don't they? I have no floppy drive.
-> If I boot from CD, will I be able to access my USB2 disk?
-> If I could do the backup "live" that would increase the chance of doing it with reasonable frequency! Is this possible? Could I ghost my windows partition when running linux normally?
-> How automated are these tools?
-> How adverse are they to restoring to a different partition than the original one?
o Using tar to create a .tar.bz2 or .tar.gz. This could obviously be done "live", and may be easier
-> Is there a disadvange? Is there something that a ghosting tool "gets" that this method doesn't?
-> This would probably not work for my WinXP partition, would it? I think it would be quite nice to have a plain ghost image containing a "fresh" XP setup (basically just XP Pro + some drivers + MS Office + Tracktion and a bunch of VSTs for music production) and just ghost this back whenever XP decides to act funny.
I suppose I could use ghosting for the WinXP partition and tar for the Gentoo partition and the "data" partition. Unfortunately, I don't really have much time to experiment with different tools (which in any case may be risky), so I would appreciate any advice and experience people may have.
Cheers,
Martin
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moocha
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Joined: 21 Oct 2003
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| Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 11:37 pm Post subject: Re: Backup to external disk - ghosting or copying? |
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| optilude wrote: | | -> Is there a disadvange? Is there something that a ghosting tool "gets" that this method doesn't? |
Nope, it'll catch everything, provided you don't forget to use the -p switch to preserve permissions. I'd recommend to select what you tar up (i.e. everything but /dev, /proc, /sys, /tmp, /usr/tmp, /var/tmp).
| optilude wrote: | | -> This would probably not work for my WinXP partition, would it? |
Correct. Files as such would be there, but permissions and alternative NTFS data streams would have gone byebye.
| optilude wrote: | | I suppose I could use ghosting for the WinXP partition and tar for the Gentoo partition and the "data" partition. |
That's the setup I'd use. BTW, 100 points for using a separate partition to store your actual data instead of using one big C: drive and then griping about having to manually pick up data scattered all over it 
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optilude
Apprentice
Joined: 29 May 2002
Posts: 248
Location: England
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| Posted: Sun May 23, 2004 11:42 pm Post subject: Re: Backup to external disk - ghosting or copying? |
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| moocha wrote: |
That's the setup I'd use. BTW, 100 points for using a separate partition to store your actual data instead of using one big C: drive and then griping about having to manually pick up data scattered all over it |
What do you use for ghosting your Windows drive? Any experiences worth taking with me?
Martin
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moocha
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 12:07 am Post subject: |
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No experience on that, sorry - I don't have any Windows installation at the moment (only have one when I need it for some project).
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lbrtuk
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Joined: 08 May 2003
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 1:48 am Post subject: |
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When it comes to the linux side, surely you want to do incremental backups.
rsync would work great for this. |
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optilude
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 11:35 am Post subject: |
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| lbrtuk wrote: | When it comes to the linux side, surely you want to do incremental backups.
rsync would work great for this. |
That's a point, actually... didn't think of that. I can use rsync for copying from one disk to another on the same machine, can I not?
However, can rsync compress the target? This would be quite useful for saving space, especially since a lot of files on my linux partition are either text or executable binaries, which typically compress well.
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moocha
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 12:17 pm Post subject: |
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Nope, it can't...
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optilude
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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| moocha wrote: | | Nope, it can't... |
So we're down to speed vs. space. :-/
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pathose
Retired Dev
Joined: 08 Nov 2003
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Location: Ohio, USA
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 3:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | So we're down to speed vs. space. :-/ |
w/ a 250gig drive, space is an issue? I use rsync to do all of my backups. I have an external USB 80gig drive, one partition reiserfs for linux backups and the other fat32 for if/when i ever need to use it on a windows box (take it with me to work, backups for a friend, etc.) Works for me, never any issues. No compession, but i'm not that concerned about the space. Which is why I can't imagine why you would be with a 250gig drive  |
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optilude
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| Posted: Mon May 24, 2004 3:34 pm Post subject: |
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| pathose wrote: | | Quote: | | So we're down to speed vs. space. :-/ |
w/ a 250gig drive, space is an issue?
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Space is *always* an issue. I'm sure I could manage to fill that disk up just by copying all the crap I have on DVD-Rs to it. I do music production on my Windows partition (the only purpose it serves), and when you do a few dozen takes of a long song, it does fill you disk up quite well!
Martin
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