Ubuntu Disk Imaging

[Rusting In Peace]

I'd like to be able to image the SSD I've got my Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 installation on.

Does anyone have any experience of this and can suggest tools to use? I'm ideally looking for something that can be run within Ubuntu via command line (for automation purposes).

If I've got software raid configured will this be preserved in reimaging?

 

[skittle]

If you are already using LVM2 then it natively supports snapshots...

 

[chamaecyparis]

Suggest trying Clonezilla -- see How2 here

 

[Ijack]

Note that LVM snapshots are in no way a backup strategy on their own, although they aid in such a strategy. See this article for more details.

Personally, I use BackupPC to copy everything to an external server. It's very efficient and is set up and forget. It also allows you to keep a hierarchy of backups so that you can easily restore individual files, or everything, to a particular point in time. A bit like Time Machine on OS X.

TBH, I don't bother with disk imaging on my Linux machines. It's so easy to reinstall and then restore that I don't find imaging useful.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Suggest trying Clonezilla -- see How2 here

Thanks! This looks great but it has a few problems:

1) As far as I can tell you need to boot into it's live environment?

2) On their website under the limitations section it's stated that "Software RAID/fake RAID is not supported by default. It's can be done manually only.".

It was unclear to me if that meant the software raid configuration or the actual raid array itself. I would have thought the raid config would be included in imaging without issue. Whereas imaging a collection of array elements might be significantly harder!

 

[Rusting In Peace]

If you are already using LVM2 then it natively supports snapshots...

Kinda new to Linux so I couldn't tell you what I was using off the bat. Correct me if I'm wrong but the boot partition isn't always LVM? I literally want to be able to image the entire disk. So that restoring it is super easy!

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Personally, I use BackupPC to copy everything to an external server.

TBH, I don't bother with disk imaging on my Linux machines. It's so easy to reinstall and then restore that I don't find imaging useful.

This machine is the server unfortunately so it will be being backed up to an external drive.

Again because it's the server and will have a whole bunch of configuration that I don't want to go through multiple times, I'd like to back it up.

 

[Ijack]

You should, of course back it up. But, unlike Windows, a Linux system can easily be backed up as a collection of files. This is far more versatile than an image backup as it is easy to restore either a single file, part of the system, or the whole system. Image backups are just too broad a stroke for my liking, and no easier to restore than a collection of files.

For protection against disk failure, use RAID. Every other type of failure or disaster is covered by file backup.

(IMO)

 

[someone19]

A true image can be had on a linux system by using the dd command, but I wouldn't recommend it for the same reasons ijack has stated. Best thing to do is configure the machine, make a tar.bz2 of the drive and store that on your external. If you ever loose the system drive, boot a liveCD, re-install the system, then untar the files you need and move them into the configuration locations.

 

[Rusting In Peace]

Best answer selected by Rusting In Peace.