Back up and Retore

[Denzil]

Good day to the Linux Community,

How may I do a linux backup,

A. To the same disk and restore in the event of a crah

B. Back up to an externail disk ot a CD/DVD and restore

Kind Regards,

Denzil

[Travis]

@Denzil -

There are many ways to do backups. The tar command provides a simple method of archiving files or directories. However, one thing I should point out ... it is never a good idea to perform a backup to the same disk that contains the data. If something happens to the disk (either a hardware failure or something with software like a reformat or repartition, the backup is lost too).

There are also more complex ways such as DD that will give you an exact duplicate of a disk, but that requires a disk of greater or equal size and it will copy non-data too (meaning the slack and other space on the disk that doesn't contain real files). 

Also, when I used to backup some machines for cloning, I would use Clonezilla which is a product similar to what Norton Ghost used to be or Acronis Disk Image.

Backups generally don't work well for CDs/DVDs as you would want to archive the files first and would likely need to create a chunked backup (meaning fixed size archives) since a CD is around 700MB and a typical DVD is about 4.6GB, meaning not much data on each disk.

[Denzil]

Hello Travis,

Thank you so much and for that wonderful education!

I have visited Clonezilla, in a view to back up my Windows 10, but it shows the downloads for AMD, while mine is an Intel. https://clonezilla.org/downloads/download.php?branch=stable#debian-cpu-arch

In a view to avoid CD/DVD would a flash disk, work? I migt have a spare HDD which can be used via a 

Yesterday I tried Windows Backup Disk/Flash, which you had suggested via an URL, and it said I need 16 GB flash.

Kind Regards,

[Travis · Accepted solution]

AMD64 is and will work, that is how some places are representing x86_64 architecture (so Intel and AMD processors) and then AARCH64 or ARM64 would be something like a RaspberryPi. 

Additionally, you will need either a large external flash or a large external hard drive. Backups are large and depending on how the backup is done, backing up installed OSes are even larger. You should look at your system in Linux on the amount of installed items (you can do a df -h) to see all mounted partitions and LVMs and add up the "used" space and add about 25% and that should give you a minimum size of a disk or location for the Clonezilla Linux backup (however, that would be just for one of the Linux variants). You would need to do that for all variants.

If you are using DD, it will take the exact size of your drive or larger as DD duplicates everything bit-by-bit, so doesn't matter if you have real or "slack" data on the disk meaning sector-by-sector and byte-by-byte is copied over.

Windows will guide you through the process (I think - again been a long time). It used to suggest a minimum disk size as it had some Windows things backed up too. I find it hard to believe that a complete Windows backup of your system would fit everything on a 16GB drive as those are tic-tacs to me now. I typically don't use anything less than 128GB or 256GB and then it doesn't hold all my "good" stuff.

[Denzil]

Good Day to you Travis,

Thank you so very much! In this few days, I have learnt a lot from you and the community here!

Appreciate for clarifying matters.

The main back up issue is to do with my MS-Windows 10 Professional, which is a 1TB disk, and 800 GB allocated for same! 

You are right, for a full back up I woud need a 2 TB disk!

Kind Regards,

Denzil