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What is a good full Linux backup system. I've used Clonezilla but it only restores back to the same or larger size disk.
What kind of backup system do you use?
I would like to do a full backup and possibly an incremental backup of my large PC system.
I like how puppylinux does its backup, but my main system has several operating systems including virtual machines as well.
Thanks
puppy linux is usually frugal install (Not full install), you dont need clonzilla.
Thanks @Trapster
I realize that if I only am using puppy linux that would be good.
On my main pc it's still a bit more complex because I'm just getting into puppy linux.
So what I have is a host using PopOS linux with several storage drives for a lot of data acquired over the years.
Then I have several virtual machines from this as well.
The puppy linux virtual machines take care of themselves using like you mentioned, their own back up systems.
I'm now using the BookwormPup virtual machine as my daily workhorse system.
But for now I'd like to back up the entire system.
Perhaps rsync is the way to go for now. I've never used that, but it looks pretty powerful all by itself.
I'm just not savy enough to know what is best and simple to do this to a backup usb drive.
In a situation where you have multiple OS's/partitions, etc. on a single disk, I always just mirror the disk to another disk using 'dd'. If I need to restore from it I just mount it to an additional mount point and copy off what I need.
Where sdX = disk to back up, and sdY = backup destination disk:
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dd bs=4096k if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY conv=notruncThis is true in all situations that are not using a commercial 'Shadow Protect' or 'AppAssure' type system that does incremental block level backups to a SAN.
Why is that a problem?
What do you want to backup? One partition? Several partitions? An entire hard drive?
That looks like something I could try.
The problem was if I had a drive crash I would like to be able to go to a smaller drive, if I had one.
Of course this shouldn't happen very often and drives are getting cheaper. I don't like the restriction.
I like using Clonezilla but wish it could restore to a smaller drive.
I do use it for backing up my laptops.
I'm backing up the whole hard drive.
Thanks guys for the ideas.
There are two strategies for doing backups - on a file-by-file basis like in a tarball or sector-by-sector like with Clonezilla.
Sector-by-sector is much faster, but the sectors in use may be scattered all over the partition due to fragmentation. So in order to restore those sectors onto another drive, the new partition must be at least as big as the original. Otherwise, there is no guarantee that the sectors could be restored to their original positions.
As a work-around, you could shrink the partitions with Gparted, then run Clonezilla. Then you could restore them onto a smaller drive.
@JusGellin
Take a look at this post: viewtopic.php?p=113202&hilit=aomei#p113202
Foxclone's doc's say it can restore (clone) to a smaller partition/drive, have not tried it though.
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
@JusGellin
You might take a look at Rescuezilla, it's like a user friendly Clonezilla.
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
@rcrsn51
Do you know of any Linux utility that will move all drive/partition data to the front of the partition?
Thanks
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
No. There are Linux defrag tools but I don't think that they do what you want.
I suspect that a "squeezing" tool like the traditional Windows defrag would be counter-productive on a Linux partition.
I do my partition backups with Gnost. But it's not designed to backup/clone a whole drive in one shot.
I use GPARTED to copy entire partitions from one drive to another. This keeps the same UUID for each partition. This process can be useful for making clones of whole drives consisting of separate partitions.
Its a matter of copy and paste (into a section of the target drive which is unoccupied).
The boot partition should come first I guess, after that its open slather.
However, it is my experience that you need to run a live version of GPARTED on its own booted usb drive to get this to work.
I tried the rsync method on my laptop that has dual boot to Alpine Linux and BookwormPup.
This drive had 3 partitions, efi, swap and root partition.
I ran rsync between the main drive to the backup folder and just file copied the efi patition. rsync is good at just copying changes once the backup is made and it needs updating. It's kind of like
puppy's save folder but the whole partition.
I had to note the partition configurations and especially the grub.cfg which needed to be manually changed to the new UUID.
But I was able to restore this all back to a newly partitioned disk with just a directory/file copy.
So this doesn't have the limitation for having to go to an equal or larger partition.
It's slower but it works.
I'm going to try some of the other methods to see how they work as well.
Thanks to all of you for your suggestions for doing this.
This is what I decided to do for my backups:
I want this to be as simple as possible.
I usually have a system drive that uses the whole drive. But it isn't necessary.
So I made the drive usage smaller by using gparted.
Then since I'm comfortable using Clonezilla, I make a backup of it.
This solves in case a crash occurs and I need to put the backup on a smaller drive.
Now since I'm using puppy linux I can take advantage of the save and backup save directories.
So I don't have to worry about making increment saves.
I can even save these saves on the same external backup drive.
This is such a great feature!
I really appreciate all the suggestions. Who knows, I may figure using something else is better.
The main thing, I'll have useful backups.
@JusGellin
The main thing, I'll have useful backups
Congratulations. 
Nothing worse than having a catastrophic failure and realizing you don't have a good backup. Businesses have completely failed in such cases.
wizard
Big pile of OLD computers
