I have a system which runs an arcade machine. It has the regular swap and root partitions, but then I have an extra partition which I call data. Data holds many gigabytes of game content.
The idea is that if anything goes wrong with the Linux system, I should be able to restore it from a backup and leave /data
intact.
My question is, what utility is best to backup and restore just the Linux system partitions? Can I just use dd
to make an image of /dev/sda1
and /dev/sda2
, for example? What about the MBR - Master Boot Record?
rsync
is good. wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_system_backup_with_rsyncrsync
is used to preserve the user permissions and other things as well which is why it is more better than copy + paste. From what I believe, you just want your system to be up immediately if it is crashing. You might want to have a script that automatically backs up the root partition to an external HDD. Then when the system crashes, you can restore it from the external HDD.