On 2008-07-31 21:55, Michael S. Peek wrote: > Hello gurus, > > I'm considering doing some dangerous tinkering with my laptop. I have > regular backups of /root /boot /etc and /home, but would like to make a > complete image of the drive as well. Ideally, what I want to do is boot > from a cd, dd the drive to a file on my workstation via ssh in such a > way that I can dd it back later if anything goes wrong. IIUC, you 'just' need a backup of your system. I'd recommend to rsync your data to your backup like rsync -ax / user@workstation:/backup/dir/ Do this for all partitions of your hard disk. (rsync runs over ssh) In case you have to restore in worst case you'd have to 1) reformat and repartition your hard disk (keep a reference of your partition info!) 2) rsync the other way round This is faster than dd, because only the actual data are transfered, while dd transfers all the empty space as well. It also saves (a lot of) disk space on your backup system. In most cases it is *much* faster than dd, since it's rather unlikely that you'll break your whole disk, ie. wipe all the data on disk. In this case, the restore process will only have to replace those files that are actually changed, ie. broken -- typically only a tiny fraction of your disk. YMMV, take care, Johannes
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