PING works nicely from a partitioned USB stick. You have the PING bootimage on a small partition (the ISO being transferred using UNetbootin). It will then happily save your backups on the remainder of the stick.

The advantage of this approach is that you can restore from a single device. And you can always copy your backups to other media for backup/storage...

Another way of doing it is with gparted and copying partitions graphically (drag and drop) or with clonezilla if you have a networ drive, or intermediary.

A useful tool to have in your drawer is the combined gparted/clonezilla CD.

http://gpartedclonz.tuxfamily.org/

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip -c | dd of=/mnt/mybackup.gz

umount /mnt

Is this really a 4-page "story" about how to create a bootable clone?

I use partimage from SystemRescueCD, booted from a usb stick rather than a CD (which is more than a little inconvenient on a netbook). You need to fsck the unmounted system partition before you try and back it up for linux netbooks, and chkdsk it if it's XP, otherwise you'll get errors if you've actually used the thing much.

Always nice to have an OS independent alternative to backing up a system!

Try using that on a running system for real...

My moneys on an image file that is junk as you will be imaging a file system that is mounted Read/Write and has lots of data still cached in the kernel.

Also I would like to see you do the restore as well DD'ing over the top of a live file system sounds like an absolutely brilliant idea.

http://www.folding-hyperspace.com/pdfs/disk_image_with_knoppix.pdf

Backup to network but some command line needed...

My experience with PING is that: a) on a drive with errors, the backup may not complete, and b) it sometimes is unable to restore the saved image. The restore process will look like it completes, but the restored disk will be unusable.

A significantly complicating factor is that Windows XP installations tend to become corrupt as a computer slowly dies, making it hard to determine if the problem is software or hardware or both. Additionally, I'm not convinced backing up and restoring a computer with potentially defective hardware is even a good idea. Specifically, I suspect that PING assumes that it is running on perfect hardware. When confronted with old and potentially defective hardware, it does not implement sufficient error checking and recovery code to deal with random small data errors. Once a few of these errors occur, the backup becomes unusable.

dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | ssh user@server dd of=/home/eee-backup/sda.iso ; ssh user@server gzip /home/eee-backup/sda.iso

If the network is slower than the netbook's chip can run dd, use SSH's '-C' argument.

That'll work. You can also use nc (netcat) as well

http://tuxnetworks.blogspot.com/2008/07/backing-up-disk-over-network.html

@Tom

This is why you boot from a live CD or USB key to do the backup. I doubt anyone was suggesting that you can use DD to backup a running filesystem.

Paris, cuz I'd backup her system anyday

I can't believe I'm seeing people seriously suggesting using dd on a mounted filesystem. Wow. And nobody has mentioned rsync.

booting from a USB stick is what I also use. My version of SystemRescueCD (v. 1.1.0, but

shouldn't it be called SystemRescueUSB?) has trouble with my eee901's ethernet, so I have

no network connection (no backing up straight to my desktop machine). I am forced to use

USB sticks for backup, but it all works very smoothly.

AlxUnder

As pointed out with varying levels of politeness above dd should be run from a boot cd/usb stick and not from a live running OS. When I had used it previously it was from a USB stick as that was what I was told to do, the link I posted above didn't state that so I didn't either on this occasion,

I was aware running it on a live system wasn't ideal, but equally I didn't realise it was so diabolically bad as people have suggested. Lesson learned and all that.

This is precisely why I mentioned in my original comment that I don't normally comment on these kinds of guides, I'm not a linux guru nor a journalist.

@Tom ... A little less venom in your replies might be helpful rather than coming over as a complete righteous nob.

Paris because someone needs some love.

You can sometimes do this, but you need to know a lot about your distro.

I do it from a live USB of Puppy.