Disk Images as backup solution

[psych1610]

I saw a post about disk images in another thread here about, of all things, Squeeze becoming stable and the flood of packages that might ensue. Back on Windows I knew of the ability to create images a la Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost, etc, (that's not saying I actually used them!) but try as I might I can't seem to find a solution that works for me here.

I believe I tried Clonezilla once, but it always errored out and just hung. Next to that, if that is even the correct way, I'm not aware of any way to do this simply either free or commercial. I've heard one can use the 'dd' command but that doesn't seem very intuitive to me. I'm not afraid of the command line, but not yet a junkie.

I would appreciate whatever tips you have to give on this issue since I have a tendency to experiment with, and therefore break, my main system.

[wayne128]

I saw a post about disk images in another thread here about, of all things, Squeeze becoming stable and the flood of packages that might ensue. Back on Windows I knew of the ability to create images a la Acronis True Image and Norton Ghost, etc, (that's not saying I actually used them!) but try as I might I can't seem to find a solution that works for me here.

I believe I tried Clonezilla once, but it always errored out and just hung. Next to that, if that is even the correct way, I'm not aware of any way to do this simply either free or commercial. I've heard one can use the 'dd' command but that doesn't seem very intuitive to me. I'm not afraid of the command line, but not yet a junkie.

I would appreciate whatever tips you have to give on this issue since I have a tendency to experiment with, and therefore break, my main system.

Well,
I have just used clonezilla to clone LMDE partition (30G) to another new partition (31G).
It took about two minutes to run through the menu to select source partition and target partition.
( make sure target partition is same or large size than source partition),
then I use all default settings, and it took another two minutes and done.

Make a bit of amendment on my grub legacy chainload to the new partition. Tested it and all run OK.
Now I am ready to play with one partition and retain old LMDE.

The only thing I would highlight is, I use partedmagic Live CD to run in RAM and use its Clonezilla within partedmagic.

[psych1610]

So it's recommended (or necessary?) to create a new partition for this?

I keep all my distros (right now just this one) like this:

1 TB hard drive for / and /home
2 TB hard drive for backups of media and such.

So in this case is it recommended to repartition the 1 TB drive so that I have a place for the images?

Also, do you know off hand if it's possible to exclude directories? I'd love to do this but I have a ton of music and videos that don't need to be imaged since they're backed up somewhere else and an image of that size would be just too large to hang on to!

As a side note I just 'apt-get upgraded' to see what would happen and nearly 240 packages want to make their way through my front door and onto my system. I'll make sure I get clonezilla straightened out before I do that.