USB-Backup

Hello, I´m new to linux but I decided to leave the linpus SO in my AcerOne.
I guess it provides the best performance and enough resources for the use I´m going to give it (internet, skype, MSN...).

But I´m always afraid of trying new things and not being able of coming back to the original configuration.
One solution is to use the usb restore option, but it will take my linpus to the default configuration, losing all the software and setup.

Can I create in linux(linpus) a backup of my currrent configuration (including everything), so I can have my own custom USB backup? (similar to the restore-CD/USB).

Thanks in advance. Regards.

 

I'm also very interested in such a solution. I just can't find any backup/restore software installed on the Aspire One. The ideal solution would be to be able to boot from a USB key and be able to restore a complete image of the system in one shot.

Anybody have any leads ?

 

I have an external USB hard drive that I use for my backups... I separated it into one smallish (~4GB) partition and one large partition, and I installed Ubuntu on the small partition. When I want to back up a machine, I just boot it from the external hard drive and use dd or partimage to back up to a file on the large partition. It's a somewhat manual process, but it's pretty simple and does the trick.

 

Thanks for your answer. I guess "dd" and "partimage" are a kind of backup software. I hope not too hard for newbies.
In my case I have succesfully started the system from a bootable USB stick with a 50Mb linux SO called DSM (Damns Small Linux), boot my ONE with it and access to the hard drive. So I guess I´m on the good way to be able to use your method. But, should I backup everything? (don´t know how), and second how to restore? Just overwritting everything? Is there some configuration files, boot config fyles or some other important thing else that I may miss?

The idea is to be able to restore all my current configurations, installed software, customization, drivers... everything, after a probable crash when trying to "test" new things.

Thanks again.

 

That's exactly what I'm after also. An easy way to backup (clone/ghost) and restore (recover) using a single USB key/drive, in case of a disaster, which may happen during my "tests". Of course, the recovery DVD could be used to create a USB key to restore the A1 to factory defaults, but I'd rather restore from my current state (configured yet untweaked).

I've downloaded Unetbootin and will attempt to create a bootable USB key with Clonezilla, see how it does..

 

error (see next post).

 

Another way is this one:
1. Install eeedora on a usb stick (just as linpus lite is an optimized branch of fedora for the aa1, eeedora is an optimized branch of fedora for the eeepc).

1.1. Download the ISO version:
http://eeedora.coderseffigy.com/EeeDora ... 01h15m.iso
1.2. Save the ISO somewhere memorable - it'll be <350Mb
1.3. Since you're running a flavour of Fedora you can use the linux command livecd-iso-to-disk XYZ.iso /dev/sdb1, where XYZ.iso is the name of the ISO file, and /dev/sdb1 is the name of the USB key partition where you want the image.
The image is added non-destructively, so other files on the disk should be preserved.
If you don't have ”livecd-iso-to-disk” installed, you will need to install the ”livecd-tools” package (and dependencies). The easiest way to to this is to use yum:
sudo yum install -y livecd-tools

2. Boot from this new made live usb stick and use dd (you can download dd using yum) to make an image backup of your harddisk on this live usb stick. dd can make a byte-exact copy of a disk (from master boot record to the last sector).

 

Partimage is an application that pulls the data from a partition, optionally compresses it, and saves it to a file or files. It can do some fancy stuff like backup and restore to/from a server on your network. It aims to be a simpler free version of Norton/Symantec Ghost, if you're at all familiar with that. You can find lots of info at http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page.

dd, on the other hand, is one of the most basic "Swiss Army Knife" Unix/Linux tools. It's not totally newbie friendly in usage, but it's very simple in that, as Thomas mentioned, it just copies, byte-for-byte, the complete raw image of the device including the boot record. And it's reversible, so once you figure out backing up, restoring is just as simple.

In essence, using dd to backup is as simple as this (don't use this command verbatim):

Code:

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/bob/acerssd.backup

In reality, you'll need to know how to use tools like fdisk to verify that you're copying the right device, and you may have to use sudo to get the proper permissions... so if you're not interested in educating yourself on basic command line tools, you're probably better off sticking with something else.

 

I've finally been able to use on the Clone/Ghost tools for linux. Clonezilla was a no go as the linux core errored out on boot on all versions I tried. PartImage is built onto Gentoo and works very nicely though.

So I made a HOW-TO on this, hopefully that will be useful to some people:
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=651&p=4646&hilit=backup#p4646

I personally didn't want (or know, or want to learn) how DD works, although that probably would have been the fastest way

 

Thank you for the answers for my question.
That´s what I understood:
1. We need to boot the Acer ONE from a bootable USB stick containing some of the light linux distribution.
2. We have to make a backup of the system with any of the mentioned software.
3. To restore, we should boot again with USB-stick and use the same software to restore.

I am very grateful for your ideas, but let me ask you (or propose) another thing:

By using the acer recover-CD, we can create a bootable restore-USB stick. It makes everything automatically.
I guess this USB stick will contain any kind of backup of the system with the default configuration.

Could we modify (somehow) this restauration point in the USB stick and overwrite it with my current system with customized configuration?

That would make much easier the restore part of the process, woudn´t it?

 

It might be possible, the recovery DVD (and USB stick it creates) contain a large .tar.bz2 file which seems to be the whole install, so if you made a tar.bz2 of your current install and replaced that file with it, it should work. I'll test this myself at some point, but I intend to do a bit more customization before bothering with the backup and then, I won't test it until I need it.

 

That's what I have done:

1. Download the systemrescuecd-x86-1.0.4. linux distribution (http://www.sysresccd.org).
2. Create a bootable USB stick with it. (Following the instruccions on the same web).
3. I booted the AcerOne with this without problems.
4. I mounted my external USB hard disk (it did not mount automatically).
5. I started PartImage and I followed the instruccions to make a backup of the whole SSD.
6. Very fast it created a file in my external hard disk, where it is supposed to be my entire system.

My question now is: If I restore the system from this file, will the restored partition be bootable as it is now? Because within the restore options there is something about MBR, and I don´t understand very well what does it mean, and I don´t want to miss something important when testing the system restore.

 

If it really did backup the entire disk, you should be ok. However, I thought partimage just did a partition at a time. To be safe, you'll want to backup your partition table, too. It's a very small amount of data, so it can't really hurt to have it around just in case.

 

For those who may want to know.
DD is not that hard.

Code:

# dd --help 

is a good start point

copy a drive to another drive

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy

hdx is the source - hdy is the destination.

notes on use at many locations including:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions ... nd-362506/
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/ddcommand.htm


Warning dd is very powerful, be careful.

 

With partimage i always have an error :
"can't read block 0" on /dev/sda1 ????