Sudo Bash
February 4th, 2014, 02:02 AM
Hello all,
What is the best way to perform a complete harddrive backup? I am going to wipe my harddrive and install a different variant from the ubuntu 12.04 vanilla. I have heard of clonezilla, FSArchive before, but do I even need any software like that? I want to make two backups. One backup would dump the entire contents of the harddrive (including partition table) to make a copy that I could restore from if I needed to revert the computer back to the installation I had. The other backup would be a copy of the files (in particular the usr and etc directories) in an easy to access form so that I could copy my files and document back to my fresh install.
For the first task, could I just use dd on the /dev device to back up to an external harddrive an image file. Then for the second task, could I just use cp -r to copy all the directories other than /tmp /proc /dev and /sys?
What is the best way to perform a complete harddrive backup? I am going to wipe my harddrive and install a different variant from the ubuntu 12.04 vanilla. I have heard of clonezilla, FSArchive before, but do I even need any software like that? I want to make two backups. One backup would dump the entire contents of the harddrive (including partition table) to make a copy that I could restore from if I needed to revert the computer back to the installation I had. The other backup would be a copy of the files (in particular the usr and etc directories) in an easy to access form so that I could copy my files and document back to my fresh install.
For the first task, could I just use dd on the /dev device to back up to an external harddrive an image file. Then for the second task, could I just use cp -r to copy all the directories other than /tmp /proc /dev and /sys?