random_task wrote:I know I could make the backup file, but I dont know if I'll be able to recover it. Mostly, I'm worried about whether or not I'll be able to write to an NTFS safely.
I think a bit by bit image will work, but I'm not sure. Does anyone know how to do something like this?
There are basically three ways to do this: using tar, using dd, and using partimage. tar will archive the files like you want, but it's not a "perfect" filesystem image, just a copy of the contents -- doing it this way will probably cause you to lose things like file ownership and permissions. Not recommended for whole drive backups. dd will make a raw copy of a disk or partition, and partimage will also make a copy of a disk or partition, but more like Norton Ghost does where it understands the filesystem so it doesn't just do a bit-for-bit copy of the entire partition including empty/unused blocks. That means the partimage images are smaller, but dd is more bulletproof. Partimage may not be able to generate an image for certain NTFS partitions with a lot of fragmentation or using the NTFS encryption/compression options.
1) You can write to NTFS safely with ntfs-3g, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing the backup that way using tar. It is handy if you want to easily access to a few directories or files, though.
2) As far as a doing a perfect image, you can simply use dd and capture the entire partition into a file (e.g. dd if=/dev/hda3 | gzip -c partition_img.gz). You can also pull files/directories out of a dd style image because you can mount it via loopback as if it was a real disk and use it that way. I use dd when I want to deploy a bunch of identical installations to machines across a cluster. I'll install on one machine and use dd and netcat to multicast the image to a bunch of other nodes and write it to their disks.
3) partimage also can make images of NTFS partitions. I've done it before and it usually works fine. Sometimes I've needed to run the Windows defragmenter to make it faster/work.
