[plug] Best partition backup program?

[Cameron Patrick]

Shayne O'Neill wrote:

| dd
|
| :)
|
| (well it wont do verify well

diff (and/or md5sum) will take care of this, though.  dd images can be
mounted loopback, which can be handy, and is something that you can't
do with pretty much anything else.  The disadvantage is that it's,
well, primitive.

tar works surprisingly well, but doesn't have an easy verify mode
(short of untar and diff).  It also doesn't back up the partition
/exactly/ as it was, which can be a problem on some occasions
(e.g. some kinds of spools and caches which look at their own inode
number; bootable Windows systems).  In its favour, you can read a tar
file absolutely anywhere, extract it easily onto partitions with
different size and filesystem type, and so on.

Partimage is like dd but better, can talk to a remote server, will do
compression, understands the filesystem layout so won't copy empty
blocks (on most common fs types anyway), and is generally quite nice.
It'll also save and restore the MBR and partition table for you.  It
apparently has a bootable CD version, too, which I've never used.

HTH,

Cameron.