What do I need to backup/restore Linux?

[testdriver]

Hi all,
I have a Sun Ultra 40 running Redhat Linux 2.6.9. It has 1 internal hard drive.

Which product do I need to backup/restore to/from an external USB hard drive? What I like is to backup the complete Linux hard drive (then incrementally backup) and when it crashes, I will need to restore the complete drive.

Thank you for any help.
-mike-

[testdriver]

Nobody knows?

[cortez]

Take a look here, It seems like previous versions (9) have worked :

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/linux-newbie/54597-true-image.html

[farmerlee]

I just use the standard acronis trueimage to backup my linux installs. Both TI10 and TI11 have worked fine for me. I first installed TI on a windows system then followed the instructions in this forum on how to make a bootable external usb hard drive. Now i can simply plug the hard drive into any of my computers and back it up no matter what OS it is running.

[testdriver]

Thanks for the replies. I appreciate them.
Some more questions:

- can I use the TI boot CD, boot up my Linux box, then do a complete image backup of the internal drive to an external drive, including boot sector and everything (all partitions including OS, apps, users etc...)? In other words, if I swapped out the internal drive with a brand new non-bootable hard drive, will I be able to restore everything from USB drive to this new drive and then boot up Linux as it was before (wiith the old drive)?

Thanks.
-mike-

[DwnNdrty]

If it is any help, I used the ver 9 True Image boot cd to back up and restore a Ubuntu system. It worked for me. I only did this as a test and saved the Backup Image to a USB drive. But I no longer use Ubuntu.

[K0LO]

mike:

Provided that the boot CD (which runs Linux) has support for all of your hardware then the answer is yes, you can back up the entire disk or just partitions. You'll have best results if your Red Hat PC uses a file system that TI understands (ext2, ext3, reiserFS, Linux swap, fat16/32, ntfs). Otherwise it will still work but will run slower.

If you are going to copy the backup images to an external USB drive then take farmerlee's advice and make your external drive boot directly into the Acronis recovery environment. Forum member MudCrab has a guide for doing that here (pdf) (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/supportfiles/acronis_bootable_usb_hd.pdf). This will make doing backups and restores very convenient. Otherwise you will have to boot from the CD.

[testdriver]

Thanks again, everyone,

- My Linux box is a Sun Ultra 40 which has a single 250 GB SATA drive. My backup drive is a 500 GB external USB hard drive, nothing fancy. I just want to do a complete image backup so that when it crashes, I won't have to reinstall everything manually. The internal drive is ext3 and I'm going to format my external USB drive with ext3 too (still waiting for the drive.)

I don't mind booting from the CD every time I backup/restore just to keep things simple :-) I'll just let it run overnight.

[MudCrab]

I would format the external drive NTFS. I don't know about Echo Workstation, but TI 11 will no longer backup to Ext3 partitions (TI 9 and 10 would).

[K0LO]

Paul:

Is that true when booted from the CD or just when running TI 11 in Windows, or both?

[MudCrab]

Mark,

As far as I know, both. However, I can check.

[MudCrab]

I don't have any Windows Ext3 file system drivers installed so I can't say for sure if TI in Windows would or woudn't allow backing up to an Ext3 partition from Windows. However, I doubt it would.

TI 10 will backup to an Ext3 partition using the Full mode version. TI 11 won't even show the Ext3 partition in the destination tree. I think the first build of 11 did, but it would just error if you tried to backup to one.

Echo Workstation 9.5 will validate images on (and possibly restore from [I didn't test it]) an Ext3 partition. However, trying to save a backup to an Ext3 partition resulted in the E0004000A: Error creating the file message. I think Acronis has pretty much pulled the plug on supporting backing up to Ext3 partitions (at least with the non-Linux versions of TI).

[K0LO]

That's quite disappointing if this is a deliberate move. My copy of TI 10 backs up fine to ext2, ext3, and ReiserFS filesystems. I wonder how to reconcile this with the data sheet:
199953 199954

How can Acronis claim to support ext2/ext3 file systems if the product will not even write to them? How can any Linux-based recovery environment not support ext2/ext3? Hopefully this is just an oversight (bug).

[MudCrab]

See this thread: Can not write any more to ext3 partition with TIH11 (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=188267)

The last post contains an answer from Acronis Support, though it's not directly from them. They didn't respond back in that thread.
-{ Quote: "translation:
"it is impossible to save backups within ATI11 Home on ext3 Partitions"
"it is not a accident that it's impossible to save on ext3. That's an position" from our management."" }-

The first tests I did would have been with build 8,027 of TI 11. The "next" build (8,053) removed the option to save to Ext3 partitions.

[K0LO]

Ugh - that isn't encouraging. Post #10 in your link is from Acronis Support, who say "Probably it will be fixed in the next build of Acronis True Image 11 Home." but post #12 says "it is not a accident that it's impossible to save on ext3. That's an position" from our management."

Reading between the lines, Tech Support thought it was an oversight but they were overruled by Management.

[Acronis Support]

Hello everyone,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Software (http://www.acronis.com/products/).

We are sorry for delayed response.

Currently, the only versions of Acronis True Image that support working with ext partitions on file level are Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server (http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATIESWin/) and Acronis True Image Echo Server for Linux (http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATISLin/). Other versions do support backing up and restoring of ext partitions (i.e. will back up only actual data), but do not support backing up to (or restoring from) them, or files/folders type of backups.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov