Desktop-Linux.Net November, 2004
Creating Linux Backups
Before upgrading or doing any serious tweaking to my system I always make a backup of my partitions. Having a backup image around allows me to be pretty brave as far as upgrading and testing beta packages goes. If it goes badly, I just restore the image file versus spending a half day trying to fix the mess or even worse, reinstalling. There are four apps I really like, Acronis True Image, Acronis True Image Server, Mondo Rescue and Partition Image. If you use Grub or Lilo, make sure you create a rescue disk and have it handy before you restore a partition with either of these boot loaders, you'll need a boot disk to restore the boot manager to the MBR (see bottom of page for more details).
Acronis True ImageKudo's to the Acronis team, not only for their support of Linux systems but also to their lightning fast email responses. The folks at Acronis were nice enough to supply me with both of the products listed below, which I have used many times to backup/restore both Linux and Windows drives. Their products have a nice interface and are very user friendly. Acronis True Image is by far the easiest backup solution for Linux I have seen so far. Acronis True Image allows you to backup a partition or entire hard drive to a compressed image file and can also clone one hard drive to another. The boxed version of Acronis True Image comes with an installation disk for "Windows only" however it also comes with a bootable cd that is OS independent and will work on any PC that allows booting from CD. If you opt for the download version, you'll need to install it on a windows pc with a CDRW in order to create the OS independent bootable CD. Acronis True Image has an extremely intuitive graphical interface and is easier to use than Partition Image or Symantec's Ghost. Unlike Symantec Ghost, Acronis True Image recognizes many linux partitions including Reiserfs and ext2-3 and is able to compress the image file. Acronis True Image 7.0 also allows you to create incremental backups, create and resize partitions. Images can be backed up to: - Hard disk drives *(Fat32 and NTFS)
- Network drives
- CD-R(W), DVD-R(W), Images can be spanned across multiple cd's.
- ZIP, Jazz and other removable media.
*The only drawback of this product is that you can not backup to a Linux partition at this time. Acronis True Image Server for Linux allows you to create an exact Linux server disk image for complete server backup. The server disk backup file includes all the server disk data including system, programs, databases, etc... After a system crash, you can restore the complete server drive contents in minutes. Based on the exclusive Acronis Drive Snapshot technology, Acronis True Image Server 8.0 for Linux allows to create a server disk backup image without interrupting server operations. Unlike traditional file-by-file backup solutions, Acronis True Image Server sector-level disk imaging approach provides you with the fastest bare metal server restore dramatically reducing your IT costs. Key features: - Real-time Linux server disk backup
- Instant bare metal server restore
- Disk imaging and disk cloning
- Incremental backup and disk image verification
- Support for SAN, NAS, RAID, network and other backup storage...
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Acronis Inc. ПО для резервного копирования.