Easiest way to backup your disks in linux

Easiest way to backup your disks in linux

Doing backups is a must. If you don't do that, you might loose all your important data.

I've tried many ways to do my backups - R-Drive Image utility, CloneZilla, etc.

But, as it turns out, the most simple things are the best:

all you need to do, is just run some live linux distribution, such as gparted live, which you can easily get on your USB stick. https://gparted.org/liveusb.php

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I'm using external disk to store my backups.

You need to find which device is your external disk using:

sudo fdisk -l

Based on capacity of media, we know that external HD is represented by: /dev/sdc disk. (5,5 TiB)

This command lists that there's usable partition on this disk represented by: /dev/sdc2

so now, let's mount it:

mkdir mydisk
sudo mount /dev/sdc2 mydisk
cd mydisk

Doing backup

Now, let's do a full backup of 500GiB disk to external 5.5TB disk into file sda.img

sudo dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -c > sda.img

This process takes approximately an hour / based on your source disk size and speed of external drive. I'm usually doing it overnight.

Restore

To restore your backup (warning: all data on your source disk will be lost!):

sudo gunzip -c sda.img | sudo dd of=/dev/sda status=progress

This process displays progress of restore operation. It's completed, when progress reaches capacity of the source disk (500 GiB).


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