[ltp] Backup/Recovery for laptop

[Dan Sawyer]

All,

I am paranoid about lost access and data. Not only do I maintain 
separate bootable partitions on the primary drive (as below), I also use 
an second cloned hard disk and adapter in the ultrabay. This allows for 
bios boot selection to either drive. Backups are disk to disk, and 
partimage allow for copying bootable partitions across the drives. This 
creates dev-test and prod environments. It allows for installing and 
testing software in the ultrabay with the potential of full rollback. 
(all this is addition to network backups to a desk side system that 
allow for full rollover. I have had my laptops fail three times, one 
600E, one 600X, and one T41 over the last 8 or so years.) - Dan

, create seperate

Joerg Bruehe wrote:
> Hi all !
>
> onion wrote (re-ordered):
>> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:27:23 +0200, Rhett Creighton 
>> <Rhett@Creighton.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I found a really good backup/recovery solution, that I wanted to share
>>> with you guys.  It is especially useful right before I try to tweak my
>>> machine, and I know I might screw a lot of things up.
>>>
>>> The software is Acronis True Image 11.  [[...]]
> >
>> Thanks for tip, but I think such tools aren't needed for experiments 
>> you are describing (kernel etc.).
>> Concerning changes in /etc (so you can freely experiment), you can 
>> use git [[...]]  Concerning kernel configuration, you can
>> configure&compile new kernel, add it to your grub configuration, [[...]]
>>       But generally yes - it's good to backup whole system from time 
>> to time. Not really because of experiments with configuration 
>> (because you simply cannot get to the state when there is no option 
>> how to boot your system - wish I could say that about Windows :D ) 
>> but it could be useful in case of HDD failure.
>> Peter
>>
>> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:27:23 +0200, Rhett Creighton 
>> <Rhett@Creighton.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I found a really good backup/recovery solution, that I wanted to share
>>> with you guys.  It is especially useful right before I try to tweak my
>>> machine, and I know I might screw a lot of things up.
>>>
>>> The software is Acronis True Image 11.  [[...]]
>
> IMO, both of you are right in stressing the importance of a full 
> backup, and Peter is right about the possibilities available for 
> fall-back even in a single installation.
>
> But still I prefer a multi-boot installation:
> I keep two bootable systems (root file system including /usr) in 
> separate partitions, both access a common /home (separate partition).
> This way, I can compare them on-disk, run diff on config files and 
> transfer my own settings, check which program (package) the one has 
> over the other, switch between them if they support different features 
> (say, one can handle WLAN better and the other dual-display) until I 
> get that fixed, etc.
>
> Using grub, this is pretty easy to manage, installation tools can add 
> boot entries for all bootable partitions (at least this worked for me 
> when I installed SuSE 10.3 in parallel to 9.3), and today's disks are 
> big enough to allow this.
>
>
> Regards,
> Joerg
>