Whole disk save/restore

[bloodandsoil]

Does partimage support saving and restoring of not only partitions, but also a whole disk?

[amalafrida]

I don't think so, since the restore process requires that a specific partition must be mounted for restore ... however, my experience is limited to that task. Perhaps another will respond with counter-information. But, it seems doubtful. A partition to restore must be specified in the restore/save process. Seems to me that you'd have to restore each partition as a separate image ...

[daviddoria]

Say I backup my main partition with the OS (ext3) to the network. In the event a hard drive failure, the process would be to install a new hard drive, reinstall linux on a new ext3 partiton, create a swap partition, and THEN restore the backed up partition to replace the new ext3 partition? Has anyone done this/ is this what it is designed to do?

Thanks,

Dave

[feffer]

Say I backup my main partition with the OS (ext3) to the network. In the event a hard drive failure, the process would be to install a new hard drive, reinstall linux on a new ext3 partiton, create a swap partition, and THEN restore the backed up partition to replace the new ext3 partition? Has anyone done this/ is this what it is designed to do?

Not exactly. This is how I recently restored a failing hdd. First use partimage to save the system partition, and use rsync (or any copy method) for your data. Replace the failing hdd with a new one. Use a Knoppix (or other) liveCD to partition the new hdd making sure the system partition is a little bigger than the one on the failing drive. Also create partitions for swap, data and whatever else you want. Then use partimage to restore the system. Reboot to make sure it works. If it doesn't, use grub-install to restore the mbr. Once the system is bootable, copy over your data. Incidentally, I do not make a separate /home directory. I think it's easier to leave home under / but have a separate "data" partition. Edit /etc/fstab to mount this in /home like "/home/username/data". Hope this helps.
Regards,
feffer