miden wrote:
I've never understood the apparent resistance to a simple imaging/recovery process in the Linux world. Reinstall the OS - rebuild apps if necessary etc. reinstall your data vs click, click, go make some coffee, get back to work. The Dark World has had simple imaging solutions available for many years (which offers a solution if you dual-boot. IIRCC Norton Ghost will create an image of a Linux system). For the average home user who is not likely to have to do reinstalls very often and is therefore not likely to have the details of the routine engraved on their brain, a simple up-to-date image would be a godsend. I would be interested in a simple command line instruction which would create an image of my system - and the instruction to reinstall that image.
You might want to look into the 'dump/restore' combination. Dump will create a dump 'image' of an entire ext2/3 filesystem at the inode level, full or incremental, and restore, well, restores a filesystem. 'man dump' will give you some good ideas on how to set up a cron job. Put the dumps on to another disk, and you'd be in good shape.
This howto (http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/March2005/article370.shtml) shows you how to use dump/restore with netcat (or ssh for the more security minded) to clone computers over a network. It worked like a charm for me, used in combination with a LiveCD. Boot the target with the LiveCD, partition the drives, format the partitions, dump/netcat/restore the filesystems over, chroot into the newly minted filesystem, run grub-install and bingo, an exact copy, down to the inodes. It handles different disk geometries and sizes fine, so long as you use matching filesystem types on both sides.
Michael