[Discuss] Possible backup scenarios for a 500GB drive

[John Blomfield]

I have just been googling on USB booting and there is a ton of stuff out 
there, mostly on pen drives but it must be the same for USB hard drives 
and it looks really messy.  So I suggest that in your case the bootable 
CD is the best route.

John Blomfield

R. Langkamer wrote:
> On 10/23/07 7:45 PM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>
>> I am just in the middle of purchasing a new system with a 500GB internal
>> hard drive, and I have heard that a good way to back up large internal
>> drives is with a large external hard drive. Such external hard drives 
>> are
>> relatively cheap these days (~$150 for a USB 2.0 500GB external hard 
>> drive
>> at atic.ca). One backup scenario I am thinking of is to periodically 
>> plug in
>> a USB external hard drive and run rsync to clone everything under / 
>> on the
>> internal drive to the external one.  Would that allow me to boot from
>> the external hard drive as a temporary measure if the internal hard 
>> drive
>> failed, and it was taking a while to replace it?
>>
>> Another backup procedure which I know would work would be to use
>> dump/restore from a rescue distro such as RIP.  (I used that method 
>> in the
>> past to restore the club shuttles to a known state after they were 
>> loaned
>> out to club members for talks.) However, that method would not allow 
>> me to
>> boot during the time when the internal hard drive was being replaced, 
>> and
>> I am wondering if the rsync method would actually allow that?
>>
>> Alan
>
>
>     While any form of cloning would allow for booting, as far as I 
> know, the boot loader needs to be changed in order for it to load the 
> external volume. For example, while the internal HD has a device ID of 
> /dev/hda1, the external HD would have a device ID of /dev/sda1. Makes 
> sense?
>     As long as you have the external drives boot loader changed, you 
> should be able to rsync to your heart's content and then if need be 
> boot from it.
>