Sunday, January 04, 2009

Backup Linux installation with Partimage

I wanted to try a Mandriva installation on my laptop, but I had run out of space: I'm using most of the time a Kubuntu, but I also have a partition with Sabayon in it, and I didn't want to lose it completely. I thought that this might be the time to try partimage, which I had always heard about.

Previously, I had been using cp for cloning a partition, but I wanted to try something new :-) Moreover, partimage has the advantage, with respect to the dd command, to copy only data from the used portions of a partition, and this can save a lot of space (besides compressing the partition image itself).

It was pretty easy to do the cloning! Partimage has a neat text interface, and here are the screenshots (I chose an external usb driver for saving the image):





And here you go! After 22 minutes I had my 15 giga partition backed up in .gz image, ready to be restore :-)

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