Anthony DiSante <orders@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > I have a pair of 120GB drives in my system, and a single 250GB drive > as backup (Western Digital with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty, just > bought at thenerds.net for $233US). The backup drive is in an > external USB2/Firewire enclosure, and I connect it once a week (twice > if I'm feeling paranoid that week) to do the backup: > > > rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/ > > So /mnt/backup/ is then an exact copy of /, and the best part is, it's > bootable and functions just like the original drive(s) if I stick it > on the motherboard. And the backup process usually takes just about a > half an hour, depending on how much new data I've added, of course. Are you sure it's really bootable? Maybe you should try it. I doubt that the MBR, /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf are correct for a single-disk configuration. These should be easy to fix as part of the recovery process, but you're going to need to boot a rescue disk first and reconfigure for the new hard disk. This is still a good method. How do you partition the backup disk? One big filesystem? -- joq
