HDD backup: taking a snapshot of the whole drive instead of partitions

jsmith6 · 03-21-2010, 11:06 AM

My netbook duals boots WinXP and Ubuntu, plus two or three recovery partitions.

I want to play with a few distros but also be able to recover the OSes it has now.

The netbook has recovery software allowing me to burn recovery DVDs with a USB DVDRW but doesn't work as promised, so I am on my own.

Instead of taking an image of each partition, can take a big snapshot of the drive to avoid fdisk/cfdisk/re-partitioning when I want to restore?

Space isn't much of a problem as I can mount via SSH/Samba/FTP.

AlucardZero · 03-21-2010, 04:20 PM

You can do this with dd.

jsmith6 · 03-23-2010, 11:02 AM

Wait, wait, wait... I just got an idea. Let's say the partitions are:

Code:

/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sda3
/dev/sda4

I can simply do a:

Code:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/samba/netbook-sda.img

and when I want to restore, no matter what the new partition table will be on the netbook, I can just:

Code:

dd if=/mnt/samba/netbook-sda.img of=/dev/sda

and it will restore everything? Just like that?

And one more thing. I have a 160gb disk (split into partitions) and only 12gb of data in it. Would, piping that through gzip -1, reduce the image's size from 160gb to 12-14gb?