Completely Backing Up Linux Installation

Question

I come from Windows, and I've been getting into Linux a little bit lately. Trying to make that my default OS for now. I've wanted to try out a couple different flavors of Linux. I spent probably a week getting Ubuntu to fully work correctly with drivers and all that and that is what I'm running right now. What I want to do is wipe out my Ubuntu installation and try some Fedora 15.

I also come from the Android world where you boot into recovery, do a complete backup of everything, wipe it and flash something else and play around with it, and if you don't like it you restore your backup from before.

Is there anything similar? So just in case I don't stick with Fedora I can reload my Ubuntu and not have to spend another week setting it up.

Answer 1

You colud use Clonezilla. It is Linux LiveCD distribution created to make backup copies of full disks or partitions.

Download it, burn on CD and boot computer. After that you need to choose source and destination - when you want to back up whole drive you need another drive to write backup on it. When you choose to back up only one partition your backup can be stored on another partition of the same HDD.

If you are not using any weird filesystems (it's probably ext3 or ext4, so it's ok) Clonezilla can back up only these parts of partition that are really used, so image is only that size that your data on your partition.

Clonezilla have easy to use console interface and every option is well explained.

If you want to restore backup you just boot Clonezilla again, choose option to restore and show where backup is on HDD.

Answer 2

One option is Mondo rescue, which can back up a Linux installation to a variety of media, including a bootable set of CD or DVDs which can restore a completely-wiped system from scratch.