I know that on Windows it's quite futile to try to backup the "C:" partition file-wise and that's why a full partition backup is needed. Is it OK to backup a the root Linux partition file-wise? Are there any downsides?
Clarification
Here, I don't care about advantages of partial backups. I'm going to do additional separate backups of /home
, etc. What I'm interested in here is the comparison of
-
backup of all files from
/
-
vs. backup of the whole partition as device
What are the advantages of something like dd if=/dev/sda1 ...
?
Best Answer
The classic backup method is to use tools like
tar
anddump
to backup the files, usually with frequent incremental backups. As you mentioned, it was Windows that popularized image type backups as it lacked the ability to backup files that were in use. File level backups allow you to perform incremental backups and restores. With image backups, it is generally all or nothing. When restoring conventional backups, you have the option to restore to a different filesystem type, and any fragmentation in the old filesystem is left behind. Image backups put everything back exactly as it was. After restoring a conventional backup, you need to reinstall the boot loader by hand, but with image backups, it's a one step simple process.If you are going to do an image backup, you want to use smarter tools like
partclone
orghost4linux
rather thandd
, which doesn't distinguish between used and free parts of the filesystem. Skipping the free parts makes for a much smaller image and faster backup/restore times. Another limitation of image backups is that they can not be restored to a smaller disk/partition than the original, even if it was mostly free space.