What backup software?

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Sun, 2008-08-10 at 19:41 -0500, Chris Mohler wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 6:19 PM, Christian <christian08 at runbox.com> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > I am looking for a disk backup software that can backup any partition to
> > an image and restore it at a later time.
> > What backup software would you recommend?
> >  Many thanks,
> > Christian
> 
> I've always just used dd:
> 
> dd if=/dev/sdaX of=/path/to/file.img
> 
> will copy from partition to image, where "X" is a partition number on
> sda.  Then:
> 
> dd if=/path/to/file.img of=/dev/sdaX

This is not generally a good idea.  If your disk has bad sectors which
are mapped out by the filesystem, then the dd will hang. It is better to
do backups at the filesystem level and not at the disk level.

I do near line backups with rsync to a network server and keep
incremental copies of the filesystems using glastree which is a Perl
implementaion of pdumpfs.  For more traditional backups, you could use
the BSD dump/restore utilities.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005