Linux backup solution. Which one is better?

[mrchow19910319]

What kind of backup solution do you guys use??? 

 

Timeshift or Clonzilla ? 

 

Which one do you prefer? Also , which kind of solution can make a physical copy of the linux drive, with GRUB fully working as well. 

I wanna backup my linux partition on my laptop and keep the windows partition as well. Currently I am duo booting ubuntu and windows.

[Sauron]

For what you want to do it may be simpler to use dd

[mrchow19910319]

12 minutes ago, Sauron said:

For what you want to do it may be simpler to use dd

dd?? 

[Sauron]

4 minutes ago, mrchow19910319 said:

dd?? 

Yes, dd

[plus]

dd has two good uses for such backups.

 

If you want to compress the raw image afterwards, you probably don't want unallocated space to blow it up.
Before you unmount (or remount "-o ro"), fill free space with zeroes.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=./filler bs=4M status=progress
# rm -f filler

This is optional, but will save you a lot on "xz -v9T0 sdX.img" or similar compressions.

 

Then take a raw copy.

• Option a) including the partition table

# dd if/dev/sdX of=/really/not/on/sdX.img bs=4K status=progress

You can access the included partitions within the image later on like this

# losetup -fP sdX.img
# mount /dev/loop0p0 /somewhere

 

• Option b) without partition table

# dd if/dev/sdX0 of=/really/not/on/sdX0.img bs=4K status=progress

and later remounts using

# mount -o loop sdX0.img /somewhere

 

 

 

[wasab]

dd stands for disk destroyer. Just by the name, you already know it is a fun program to mess around with....

[igormp]

I really like to use rsnapshot for delta backups of my devices.

[Dutch_Master]

I'm using rsync. It helps both desktop and file server run Linux, so using SSH keys I can seamlessly copy files over. And as the file server also has an NFS server I can browse the backup location from my desktop equally seamless. The file server has a RAID6, totalling 8TB, so I can also back up the video-drive in my desktop (which accounts for 4+ TB alone!) while having a 2-disk redundancy.

 

HTH!