Andrew Walker wrote:
> On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 16:59:57 +0200, Johan Lindquist wrote:
>
>
>>So anyway, it was like, 15:54 CEST Apr 01 2005, you know? Oh, and, yeah,
>>Andrew Walker was all like, "Dude,
>>
>>
>>>I started playing with Gentoo on a 20 Gig hard disk and,
>>>unsurprisingly,
>>
>>Actually it is rather surprising.
>>
>>
>>>it's run out of space! Is there any easy way of migrating my system
>>>over to another disk without installing from scratch?
>>
>>Before you do that, make sure to clean out /usr/portage/distfiles and
>>/var/tmp/portage. I can't really see how you'd manage to run out of
>>disk unless you're stockpiling distfiles or keeping workdirs around.
>>
>>If that doesn't do it, post some more info about your choice of
>>partitioning and the output of 'du -sk /*' and maybe someone can help
>>you figure out exactly where you've accumulated all that bloat.
>>
>>That being said, tar, cpio and even cp -a might do for a migration.
>
>
>
> Thanks, that's freed about 10 Gig!
> As I may migrate anyway, I need to do a backup. Can you recommend an easy
> (i.e GUI) backup tool? I want to backup to another ext3 disk but I'm
> worried that using tar files in a terminal may be beyond me!
> Ideally I want a package that will easily backup my system through a GUI
> and if my x-server fails can be restored via a terminal.
> By the way, is there a way of making tar files corruption proof, I've
> used par tools with windows in the past in case the tar file becomes
> corrupted. Also is there a file size limit to ext3, I backed up to a
> fat32 file system once and as the tar file was over 4Gig I lost the
> entire backup!
>
>

I reckon the easiest and best backup tool in the world is rsync. It's so
fast and smart and I've never had it break on me at all. Just use this one:
rsync -avu --progress <src> <dest>
and if over a network:
rsync -avue ssh --progress <user>@<host>:<src> <user>@<host>:<dest>
and if you want to do a dry run first just to test it will put files
where you want, just add a -n at the end so it can be easily deleted
when you go back through your command history to do the real thing. I
love it so much I mostly use it instead of cp.

As for partition images, there's a good gui (ncurses) tool to use. It
even comes on Knoppix (don't try backing up a mounted filesystem
please). It's called partimage and can even restore partitions to a
different (try bigger) size. It also compresses the partitions on the
fly. It's alot like Norton Ghost which is considered the bees knees of
partition imaging.