Acronis trueimage for linux ?

I have acronis true image. It can handle linux filesystems.
If I make backups of both windows and linux partitions, ayway to image a new HDD with these so that the new HDD will dual boot ?

 

I don't think that Acronis can handle dual boot arrangements; it considers a hard disk as a partition, and so you would have to create two images.

What you can do is place the image of Windows in the Linux partition and the image of Linux in the Windows partition. In this way you can guarantee that, in the event of losing one OS, you can use the other OS to restore it. Just an idea.

 

wearetheborg, I'm not entirely sure what you are asking. Are you just trying to make backup images of your system or are you trying to make an exact clone of your whole hard drive?

If the first case, I would make image files of both partitions and store it on your other disk. This way you can have multiple backups.

If the latter case, it might be easier to set up the partitions on the second disk to match the first and then directly clone the partitions. I don't know if acronis can do this or not, but there are other free programs that can. Also note that you'll have to copy the boot sector to the second disk (or run the grub installer on it). You know, if this is what you're trying to do maybe you should look into software RAID.

 

altimar, yes, I'm trying to clone the entire HDD. Isnt RAID 24/7 ? I just want to make occasional clones of the HDD partitions.

So I have a windows and a linux partiotion, and I want to put them back on a new HDD if the current one fails. I have an external HDD/dvd on which I'll be storing backups for each partition.

 

You could then just make archives of both partitions and store them separately on your external HDD; I'm not sure about your boot sector, though.

 

Yes its possible to back-up a whole dual booted system and restore it on another HD, but you will need a plugin called 'Acronis Universal Restore' in order for the windows system to be able to properly boot up without showing a BSOD on the restored new machine. Linux on the other hand you would have to edit some files in single user mode if the address of the HD has changed, lets say from hda to sda etc after restoration.

You'll have to re install grub/lilo after the restoration if you see a black screen after the bios or the word "GRUB.. ". This will solve any boot loader problems. Also change the address in the grub.conf to reflect the new address of the linux or windows partition.

 

Universal Restore is only needed if you restore to another computer. Just restoring to another hard drive on the same computer you can use plain ole True Image.

If it helps I recently cloned a Ubuntu 7.10 drive to another drive using True Image ver 9 which I use for my XP systems. I think you will have less problems if you create and use the Rescue CD for all your Backup, Recovery, and Clone functions. I used the Rescue CD to do the cloning.

 

What I use is a liveCD called SystemRescueCD that has partimage on it. It boots up to a command line where I plug in my USB hard drive and create a mount point for it (mkdir /mnt/usb), mount it (mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb), and then run partimage. Select the target partition, the destination image file (/mnt/usb/windows.000) and any other options like compression (I usually use fast).

It does not clone empty space like dd and some other linux backup programs do. One problem is that you will not be able to restore the image on a partition smaller than the original, even if the data will easily fit on the new partition. It does automatically split the images files when they get too big (most USB disks are formatted FAT32, which has a filesize limit of 2.1GB). It's also pretty fast compared to some programs I've seen. I have a 15GB partition and I think it takes 30 - 40 minutes and I get about 50% compression on it.

It's a fairly time consuming process, but I usually only do it every couple months or when I want to try something new that may damage my partitions. For everyday backup, I use rsync to sync my home directory to a remote server, which then compresses that folder so I can go back a couple months to get files I deleted or changed. This process only takes 30 seconds or so before I shut down for the night. Can't beat that.