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Hmm, I'm a bit wary of this kind of backup, because it seems like it's nontrivial to recover part of your data if half of the backup goes bad. While the old fas

Hmm, I'm a bit wary of this kind of backup, because it seems like it's nontrivial to recover part of your data if half of the backup goes bad. While the old fashioned rsync/copy all your files may be less efficient, you'll still have whatever it managed to copy if something goes wrong partway through. This reminds be of doing a tar archive of all your files--if the archive is corrupted during that process, what then?

keithpeter 13y ago
I use clonezilla to image the whole hard drive including OS once I have a 'clean' setup with an empty home and all my software installed. Then I use rsync to copy all my 'stuff' back off a large external hard drive to the 'clean' installation. I try not to change OS to often :-) Subsequently I use rsync with --delete set to sync the home drive only to an external drive of similar capacity to the computer drive for daily changes. This drive is ex4 and preserves ownership and permissions, and includes dotfiles. Once a week there is rsync without --delete to a large external hard drive as 2nd backup. This drive is NTFS and does not preserve permissions and excludes dotfiles. I have a free dropbox account for really crucial 'working' files. That gets rsync'd to a FAT32 stick each day using the 'time window' command so it does not write everything each time. Basically the clonzilla whole drive backup is just to save time/bandwidth with re-installing and setting up. The rsync backup to the large drive is file readable on work PCs that use Windows should disaster strike. The 'sync' to the small hard drive is readable at file level on anything I can boot from a live CD. Now, a bootable whole disc image would be of interest now and again.
allgood38 13y ago
Well actually, from a recovery point of view, you get some options. You can mount the image as a block device and perform operations on it. Say the image was corrupted, you could always try to mount the specific partition and run a fsck utility on it.

keithpeter 13y ago

I use clonezilla to image the whole hard drive including OS once I have a 'clean' setup with an empty home and all my software installed. Then I use rsync to copy all my 'stuff' back off a large external hard drive to the 'clean' installation. I try not to change OS to often :-) Subsequently I use rsync with --delete set to sync the home drive only to an external drive of similar capacity to the computer drive for daily changes. This drive is ex4 and preserves ownership and permissions, and includes dotfiles. Once a week there is rsync without --delete to a large external hard drive as 2nd backup. This drive is NTFS and does not preserve permissions and excludes dotfiles. I have a free dropbox account for really crucial 'working' files. That gets rsync'd to a FAT32 stick each day using the 'time window' command so it does not write everything each time. Basically the clonzilla whole drive backup is just to save time/bandwidth with re-installing and setting up. The rsync backup to the large drive is file readable on work PCs that use Windows should disaster strike. The 'sync' to the small hard drive is readable at file level on anything I can boot from a live CD. Now, a bootable whole disc image would be of interest now and again.

allgood38 13y ago

Well actually, from a recovery point of view, you get some options. You can mount the image as a block device and perform operations on it. Say the image was corrupted, you could always try to mount the specific partition and run a fsck utility on it.