Mageia forum

EDIT doktor5000: continued from viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6040

wintpe wrote:personally i cant find anything that backs up my PC completely more than clonezilla.

Redobackup ... But it's not the same as clonezilla, and has a slightly different target audience

While I will grant that clonezilla can be used to produce a backup, I would dispute that it is a good backup program, since you must take down the system you are using and boot into it in order to use it. Inconvenient at best, and a manual operation which means it will tend to not get done often enough.

jiml8

agreed when referring to a server environment, and netbackup, amanda and many other incremental backup systems are the best choice in that arena.

but for the majority of "ive only got one PC, people, and its more often than not multibooted", clonezilla ticks all the boxes

regards peter

Wintpe, if clonezilla works for you, then carry on.

But the boxes clonezilla does NOT tick off as a backup program are "automated" and "maintenance-free". Manual operations are less likely to occur than automatic ones and, given that a backup is supposed to protect you, an operation that does not occur is not a desirable situation.

Granting that many people multi-boot, this does not relieve the requirement to have a backup system running. Depending on the details, one backup system in each OS for each OS might be adequate or one backup system that works across all OS's regardless of which is running when backup time comes might be best. The point is that automated and maintenance-free solutions DO exist...either as packages or as roll-your-own.

I use the same backup system in my workstation that I use on servers - and it is descrbed here: viewtopic.php?f=41&t=5957 .

This mechanism probably would even work on a Windows host, though I guess you'd need cygwin.

Speaking personally, I use a lot of virtual machines in my workstation. I backup the workstation as described...and it happens automatically...and I backup the virtual machines in a fashion that is appropriate to the VM. Some of the routinely used Linux VMs get backed up the same way as the host does, and I back up the Windows VMs in a fashion that is analogous to clonezilla; I just copy the whole damn thing to another location (which is MUCH better when the Windows machine gets hosed...we all know how ugly Windows is to repair, with that gawdawful registry...).

The point is, though, that the whole thing happens AUTOMATICALLY. I'm never in the situation where I say to myself: "I wish I had taken a backup yesterday, because now I'm screwed..."