Backup Utilities

[Chronictank]

Anyone recommend a utility to backup a whole drive (the one my OS is on) to another drive, compression of the backups would be preferable.
A bit to bit backup isnt really ideal as the drive im backup up to is a little smaller than the source (source is about 11gig, the backup is about 10gig so i need to not include the cata and toa directories)

thanks

 

[Ryuno]

Don't really have any links, but i'm sure I remember a program called GHOST, which is like a Mirror/backup utility.

 

[Chronictank]

unfortunately Symmatec Ghost is a bit by bit one :<,
the compression on it isnt really that impressive either

 

[Ingafgrinn Macabre]

Acronis True Image.
Works perfect. You can select a disk or folders or so to backup and a compression factor. Can use it from within windows or linux, or you could use the bootable backup disk

On standard it skips pagefiles and hibernation files etc 'cos they're automatically regenerated anyway.

 

[Kami]

Chronic you might want to run CCleaner on your PC first, did it on mine and it took away 800mb of rubbish from 4 months use. Bit worrying to be honest!

 

[Killswitch]

Are you wanting to copy between two machines or from one disk to another in the same machine? Across a network, both SSH and RSync can be used for windows to windows copying.

If it's the same machine, you could just drag'n'drop or you could use the built-in windows backup tool which creates a single compressed file (.bkf) which can be used to restore files.

We used to use a combination of these at a remote client. We used Windows Backup on the windows server and saved the backup file to a Samba share on their linux box then used RSync with high compression to copy the backup file onto a server at our office. Luckily, we managed to convince them to pay for a tape backup after a couple of years!!