Creating an image of the system partition in Linux? [SOLVED]

[morris]

Usually when I installed Windows, I did create another partition for the data, and soon after installing I made an Image of the drive with the system using the program Power Quest Drive Image and I put that image onto the data partition. So that if I catch some virus or want to get rid of confusions from too many installed and deinstalled progs I can just replace the corrupted image partition with the new and freshly installed version of the system as it was just after I installed my basic programs.

Is there anything like Drive Image in Linus as well? I would want to create another partition for data anyway and then I think it might be useful to create an image of the freshly installed system, when everything still works smooth. May be Linux comes with some inbuilt prog that does the trick. It might come handy to know this before actually installing.

[oobetimer]

You can use tar commands for backuping. An example root-partition /

sudo tar -cjvf root_backup.tar.bz2 --exclude=root_backup.tar.bz2 --exclude=/home --exclude=/media --exclude=/mnt /

http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_tar.htm

[LarryP]

I belive you can do that with aptoncd but think you might need to burn it to cd or dvd to move it to another partition but then I've never treid to move things from one partition to another in linux. Another option is remastersys if it is not in the repositories you can get it from sourceforge, just make sure you have build-essential and gdebi on your system- they should be there but it doesn't hurt to look check those out in package manager by typing the name into the search box. If you are interested in what could be called a 'server style'' backup the following link is an excellent tutorial written by scorp123 http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... nix+backup . I suggest reading at least through Fred's posts. another highly knowledable and helpful person here.

[tdockery97]

You can also use a program called Clonezilla. It will make an exact image of your system partition. The image can then be stored on your data partition and restored later. It does exactly what you described. You can find the details about it here: http://clonezilla.org/. It runs from a live cd or dvd so will work even if your system completely crashes.

[Elisa]

The same job as written above, does also the "ghost4lin" - http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/H ... x-53.shtml

[morris]

@ Elisa and tdockery:
Your tips seem to me more familiar, cause that is close to what I did in windows. Also I use Filezilla and FF already in Windows, so that is another plus.
I think I might want to try out the other suggestions as well. After all I am just getting really excited about Linux and also the Terminal seems interesting to me. When I started out with computers I had some DOS-Version. Later on, when things crashed or once when I stupidly locked myself out of my own comp with a very complicated password, I was so glad, that I still could do some simple tricks in DOS. I went in with the rescue-floppy and then there I deleted the program bootmagic which had that password which didn't let me in. Afterwards I could start the thing without password-protection.
Any thief wanting to get in in my absence could have done the same though, so much for password-security.