Drive Image

[okalex]

I have a 20GB hard disk that includes an OS (win98) and lots of data. If I have an an external USB HD far larger, can I use it to store one or several images of my entire system in case I with to resore it after I completely erase the contents of my HD?

If yes, how do I do that? And will the image be the same size as that of the data?

 

[dboy]

Yep - you'd need a program like Norton Ghost or other drive image software. And the image will be the size of the total used space on your drive, unless the program does compression, in which case it could be smaller.

 

[okalex]

Thank you for your reply. Are there any other programs like Norton Ghost (preferably low-cost ones)?

 

[daveybrat]

Acronis True Image 9.0 is the best for your needs. I used to use ghost, but acronis is much easier with a lot more options.

It will create a bootable cd that you can boot to and then create an image file of your entire hard drive onto another hard drive, even a usb one. You can choose from 4 or 5 different levels of compression too, so you should be able to get a 20GB full hard drive down to a 13-14Gb image file no problem.

 

[daveybrat]

Newegg Acronis 9.0

It's $29.99 at Newegg and you can get retail box or you can download it.

 

[cker]

I've had great experiences with Ghost. You can use a Linux boot CD to backup a partition, at no cost, but it's significantly more work-intensive and you may want to keep up with a boot media that'll let you rewrite your MBR just in case. Again, please don't try this on your real data unless you've done it with drives about which you do not care.

What got me started was this link on cpqlinux.com
What follows below is basically totally from them, but changed to match what I did.

I'm not recommending you do this -- but what I did was:
0. I had a single internal IDE hard drive, and an external USB disk drive.
1. Boot from a Knoppix CD.
2. Use "fdisk -l /dev/hda" to verify I can see my partition map on the first IDE device.
3. Use "mkdir -p /mnt/usbdrive ; mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive" to mount my USB drive.
4. Build the partition backup with "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.partition1.img"
5. Build the MBR backup with "dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.mbr"

Restoring would just replace steps 4 and 5 with
4. dd if=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.partition1.img of=/dev/hda1
5. dd if=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.mbr of=/dev/hda

Restoring is contingent on you having the exact same partition layout on the drive, though. If you change your partition geometry then this will almost certainly not work. I used this for a little while, then bought Ghost. Ghost has some other features that are nice, like the ability to browse the old drive snapshots (much easier if they're not broken onto CDs), which really made it worth it for me. The first time I was able to browse out the one file I'd deleted from my backup image withouth blowing away the whole system, Ghost paid for itself

Again, caution and careful, YMMV. Test before relying on it, please.

 

[Navid]

If you create an image of the full 20GB drive and then restore this image to the same 20GB drive, you will have a full 20GB drive!
Is that what you want?

 

[okalex]

Originally posted by: Navid
If you create an image of the full 20GB drive and then restore this image to the same 20GB drive, you will have a full 20GB drive!
Is that what you want?

Yes, this is exactly what I want.

Thank you all for your help and very useful information!