This post is currently more of an in-process note to myself to remember stuff I had to just rediscover. Last time I did this I was going from Ubuntu 6.06 x86 to 8.04 x64. Should it help you too, all the better! (And yes, this will work on Windows files just as well, I used it when moving from XP to Linux originally.)
- Use live Linux CD to boot system (this time, used an old 5.x series Knoppix CD I had already — the latest Knoppix 6.2.1 seems to have changed dramatically and did not leave me feeling familiar enough to recreate what I’d done the last time, x years ago)
- Make sure disc partitions to be imaged aren’t mounted to prevent activity changing contents. With this version of Knoppix it was easy, with the disk icons showing on the desktop
- Use df -h to confirm what is mounted where. I had originally tried doing all this with the SystemRescueCD v0.2.19 but I must have been doing something wrong with mounting the partitions, which I was able to do correctly here
- Use sudo to mount /media/sdc3 partition (the target destination on removable USB disk) as root, then
sudo partimageto start the PartitionImage tool
PartImage’s use is pretty straightforward, but need to be sure to specify the entire path to the image file! Eg: /mount/sdc3/IMAGE-FILE-BASE-NAME . Pretty much all the rest was intuitive and just using the defaults, which produces image files in appx. 2GB image chunks (so a further backup to DVDs for offsite storage would have 2 or 4 of them per single or double layer disk, respectively).
Don’t walk away until you have confirmed the result of the disk check, or it will just wait for you and do nothing more!
Backing up the entire appx. 4GB Ubuntu 8.04 system file set took just 1-2 minutes to create the resulting compressed 1.4GB IMAGE-FILE-BASE-NAME.gz.000 file. Doing the same for the appx. 40GB of /home directories of the same installation is predicted by PartImage to take about 1.5 hours and is well underway. Given it is currently at 37% completion and the image files are now about 14GB, there is likely to be much less compression benefit for these files. This makes sense, as much of the content is already compressed music, photo and video files.
This is a great free (in all meanings) tool set. Once done, I will have great confidence that installing a fresh Linux Mint 9 or Ubuntu 10.04 on my main desktop will be without serious risk to recovery of my precious prior work.