Backing up LVs

[Thiers Botelho]

If I can be of any help regarding the use of partimage:

In the past (read that as Fedora Core 1 time), I successfully
performed back-ups AND RESTORES of Win32 partitions on single- and
dual-boot systems, using partimage under SystemRescueCD
[http://systemrescuecd.org/] .

IIRC, that worked for Win98, WinNT, Win2K and WinXP.

I managed to make backups and restores to/from another disk on same
system, as well as to/from a network drive using a samba connection.

I don't have the exact numbers right now but I can give some
approximations. One WinXP system partition of 5 Gb size, containing 3
Gb actual data, would be backed up to an image file of about 1.5 Gb
size (that's a 50% average compression factor), taking about 2 minutes
when recording backup to a local disk.
Restoring a given backup is usually faster than recording it.

Partimage also does a customized slicing of the image file, so that
your 1.5 Gb backup image can actually be, say, a 650 Mb file plus a
bunch of 50 Mb files - very nice for arranging stuff on a number of
CD-R's.

[anti-MS rant]

Actually the end result of my WinXP restore was "slightly" botched (it
wasn't partimage's fault at all, rather it was due to Microshoft's
copy protection schemes).

In this awful case, I had a Win98 on C: drive and WinXP on F: drive
beforehand. I needed to increase the size of C: and F: , but in order
to do that I needed to shuffle other partitions around (used Partition
Magic for that).

The end result was, the first boot of WinXP (after restored with
partimage) detected it was not on the original partition it was
installed, required some magic which I don't remember right now, with
the end result that I had to perform a "repair/reinstall" (or whatever
it's called) of WinXP. After that last tragical / ominous step, WinXP
finally agreed to work . . . after converting F: to D: on its own,
leaving me with an OS that worked well and with 90% of all apps still
pointing to a now non-existent F: drive. Fixing those one-by-one was a
very un-funny experience.

[/anti-MS rant]

Cheers

Thiers