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 mydiskcd mydiskDoing 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.imgThis 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=progressThis process displays progress of restore operation. It's completed, when progress reaches capacity of the source disk (500 GiB).
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Author bio
Matej Koval is a Full stack senior Java developer, Scrum master of a team.
Experienced in Debian Linux administration and technologies like: Spring Boot, Quarkus, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, Angular.
More info about me: LinkedIn