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For a total backup of your entire box everybody seems to recommend something different (mostly clonezilla): I am now going to follow this tradition and recomend mondo

It detects your USB disks and recommends the backup location. You can split your backup into pieces of 700mb if you want to back up everything to CD's.
And it does so without fussing.
I just entered my way through the suggestions and it even found my fubared 1 Terra My Book that neither Linux nor Windows can mount anymore.
It suggested /dev/sdc0 and that looked about right so I hit enter. I set my backup media size to 10000 MB and started the thing and went for a
Now it is no surprise that the backup eventually failed where even gparted had to give up so why do I recommend it? Well the logs were all very detailed and with good explanations.
Mondo also does not care if you back up Windows and Linux in one process.
This is all fine and dandy but the true test comes when you want to restore your data. Mondo makes a bootable image and lets you test it before you "destroy" what is left of your box.
That sounds good to me.

To start it . never mind reading that long and boring manual (be a man! ) and just install mondo (it is in Mandriva repos and in Arch AUR).

Then connect your backup media and type After that it is a piece of cake.

Here are some of Mondo rescues data:

Image-based backups, supporting Linux/Windows, I don't think it cares much about filesystems. Backs up MBR too, along with partition layout.
Compression rate adjustable
Can backup live systems (without having to halt it, unlike most, e.g. Clonezilla).
Can split image over as many as you want (just set the size for a CD - 700 MB to backup to CD, etc.).
Supports booting to a "live cd", in a sense, to perform a full restore.
Can backup/restore over NFS, cd's, tape drives and what not.
Can verify backups
Neat-o ncurses interface. Plus a free progressbar!
Customizable to all kinds of ends
Can get a bit confusing/time consuming to get up and running, and verify everything works.

Hmm I take it back their home page has been down all day and I needed to read up on how to get that backup to my USB disk with a CD-rom start- CD....

hmmm. Had always heard good things about mondo. Nice post.

Yeah I downloaded Redo and it is doing its stuff now without the need to read anything. Just downloaded and burned the Iso and it also found the crappy 2 terrabit My Book. I could run a lot of tests and it turned out it has 39 bad sectors.

Don't buy My Book - did I mention that?
Now I am waiting for that backup to finish - it all looks good.
Redo is a front-end for partclone (as is Clonezilla):
http://partclone.org/
And it all worked well. But if you make a backup to a disk that is to small both these programs are going to leave you in a world of crap with error messages like error1 ???? (etc). You need to make sure that the backup media is big enough there is no check before you have spent 2 h and it finaly fails
And the mondorecsue site has been down for two days now

I finally decided to go through with a Mondo backup.
I picked my external HD and picked mostly anything ecxept Windows on my Mandriva superduper box. I did exclude my downloads directory (And should probably have excluded more) and chose maximum compression since I have enough CPU power on that box. I chose to let Mondo make DVD sized isos.
I can then burn the isos to DVD's and install the exact copy of my Mandriva installation.
Since I use the Guake drop down terminal I just started the job and hit F12 so the terminal disappeard and let me work as normal.
This is a good thing since my box had gathered a lot of stuff over the years so the backup took some time - in fact close to 24 h!
But that did not matter I even did play Age of Empires with play on Linux without disturbing the backup.
So here I am the 24 h later and it all seem to have worked perfectly.
Mondo created 28 isos (Yes I really need to clean up my box that is way to much - I know) And when lightening strikes I will just burn them to DVD's and boot the first one.

Then it should only be a matter of feeding DVD's until I have installed the exact replica of what I have "backed up". This really is no traditional backup it is an installable replica.
It might have taken so long because I asked Mondo to verify everything. And after a look at /var/log/mondoarchive.log it all looks good.
This thing must be good:

Mondo is in use by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA's JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.

I consider many of them to be professionals.

But no system is perfect until you have tried to restore your backup or in this case install it. So I went to my VB and made a virtual machine and picked the first my_PC.iso

It fires up a nice menu where I can choose to re-install all or just pick stuff interactively.

So I will play around with it and get back.....
It looks like Mondo is trying to adjust the partition table to the size of my Virtual disk:

As you can see it is complaining about the size of the swap disk so I highlight it and alter it:

Since I chose to eliminate Windows during backup it seems to have problems with the windows partition so I will edit it away:

And I can't do that since the MBR is on sda1 - I should have thought about that before I made the backup
But I changed sda1 to ext2 and reduced the size to 10MB and voila the partitioning went through.

Lots of complaints but it went through.
An I definitively do not want to restore all of my data So I pick no and get asked if I want to restore some of my data and yes that is what I want so it presents me with a list of files:

So I pick the most essential ones:

I think this is an indication that this thing will work but naturally I cannot restore much to a VB....