That’s the sound of me making happy sounds, which should make a change from the black overtone which surrounded the second-from-last post. Oddly, when I wrote that post, I wasn’t actually depressed about anything, it just sort of drifted into a black hollow the more I typed.
I think I was mainly upset about the fact that JT, someone who I have worked with, and got to know as a good friend since I started at Employment Palace back in 2001, has moved onto the “other rotation”, which means he will work the days I’m off, and vice versa, and I will never work with him again.
Over the years, he has introduced me to some songs which have became my favourites. Songs which I will never have heard, if it wasn’t for his MP3 CD player being brought in every day, and the collection of obscure Finnish Gypsy Punk stuff he used to bring in. I’m thinking stuff such as the truly awesome “Pellonpekko” by Korpklaani I never thought I’d like a song that even subtly makes use of one of those twangy mouth-harp things.
And if it wasn’t for him, I would have never heard of the Dropkick Murphy’s, and I certainly wouldn’t have learned every single word to The Spicy McHaggis Jig
Um. Anyway, that’s what drove me to writing that depressing post.
Moving on, I’ve been keeping myself busy. You should all know that I’m a really anal bastard when it comes to backing up data. I can’t sleep at night if I know there’s a partition of my hard drive not backed up in some way. Lots of sleep has been lost due to the fact that I have NOT been able to do a backup of my C drive in full. That was, until I found Clonezilla.
On Friday morning, I did a blog post about it while I backed up my hard drive, but I never finished it it. So, in order to make this particular post look bigger than it really is, here it is. Beware of the sudden ending though… If backing up your hard drive isn’t really important, or you’re not interested, then just scroll past the italic. I know it’s badly written, I just don’t like to see big blocks of my text be discarded.
Hello. You join me at the beginning of another one of my “live” experiments, where I do something computery and then blog about it, in the vain hope that it sparks the interest of someone reading it, though that is of course, unlikely.
Therefore, I shall introduce you to this little project.
I’m always interested in finding new ways to backup my data. This is because my computer sucks, and my hard drives keep failing. I have been searching around for something like a “live” CD that would allow me to backup my drives quickly and easily.
Whilst at work yesterday, I heard of a little-known suite of programs called Clonezilla, though you already gathered that by the title of this post.
This is, the hopefully successful tale of the cloning of my current C: drive onto a different hard drive.
Rights, let’s do this thing. Firstly, to avoid problems, I’m just moving anything important off the 2nd partition of that drive. This isn’t a necessity, obviously, but seeing as I’m switching to a “new” drive, I decided to do it.
I did a test run of this backup thing yesterday, and after it discovered bad sectors on the drive, it was then I decided to do it for real.
For the record, my C drive is a 30Gb partition, with a teeny little 8Gb used. This means that I am able to compile the backup onto a 16Gb USB card, in FAT32 format. I will expand this description at a later date when I use an actual external hard drive, but more on that later.
I will skip the pre-requisites. If you’re using this as a tutorial (lol), then I assume you already have the disk created as an ISO, and know how to boot from it. This will save me a bit of time typing, as I’m feeling incredibly lazy at the moment. To be honest, I shouldn’t really have to type any of this out. If you’re in a position where you’re considering a live Cd to backup, then you really should know what you’re doing
For those of you who have ever fiddled around with any type of live OS, you know the annoying little hoops to get the thing started. Thankfully, for this, these are few. You get your beatuful splash screen, with more options than you can shake a stick at…
I chose the “To RAM” option. This sticks everything in memory, meaning that the CD isn’t accessed whilst the program is run.
After that, the “Start Clonezilla” screen. Then the “choice” screen. You get a choise to backup from disk to disk, disk to image file. For this experiment, as mentioned before, I’m going to backup my C partition to an image file on a removable USB stick, so I select “device-image”.
Next is the “Mount clonezilla image directory”, which is a fancy way of saying “Are you going to use a HDD/USB stick, or save it over a network?” In this case, I chose a local device. The network options wre just too complicated for this time on a morning, though I can see how they would have their uses.
You get a warning just in case you forgot to plug in the appropriate USB device. How nice of them.
Now, at this point, I originally had an issue. I have no idea whether it will occur with everyone else, but it froze on “Getting /dev/sda1 info…”. A simple fix for me was to push Ctrl+C. You will need to do this after each device. Why it freezes, I can’t explain.
(EDIT: 21/2/09… the reason was a reported bug in the 1.2.1-37 release, it was fixed with the following version, 1.2.1-39, which came out three days later, therefore, my solution would be to download and install that new version, as it worked for me).
The next screen is a big block of “WHAAAAAAAT?”.
It tries its best to explain how the partitioning name sequence works in Linux (all of your /dev/sda1 stuff). I think it’s designed to make you go bong-eyed (or me straight-eyed), but basically, it’s asking you “Where do you want to put the backup files?” To help you work out where you want it to go , it gives you the size of the partition, the disk the partition resides in (obviously, mine there will be on “SD/MMC Reader”, so it’s /dev/sdc1) and a serial number if the disk has one.
(Note in that screenshot, none of the disks have serial numbers? I think this is where the afore-mentioned freezing originated from?)
It will then ask you where on the disk you want to save it. I have little choice, as the card was freshly formatted, so “/” is my only option.
It then gives you a breakdown of what is used on the disks currently mounted on the system, so you can check that the disk you’re about to backup to has enough space.
After that, you’re almost done. A couple more steps to backup heaven.
The next step is building the backup image. And this is where it takes some time, to quote the only part of a Jimmy Eat World song I actually know.
Now, in my situation, I know the disk was bad. The old power supply murdered it, so it was no surprise when I got bright-red errors from
Yes, folks.
That’s where it ended, but WHY did it end so abruptly?
It’s because I’d successfully backed up my C drive AND restored it to a new hard drive without ANY trouble at all, and all I wanted to do was play with it. Therefore, I shall have to give Clonezilla the highest possible “Meh, it worked for me” seal of approval. And for those of you who (wisely) skipped the text, welcome back to today.
If you live in the UK, you can’t have failed to notice that we actually received some snow. The slightest hint at the white stuff, and the whole bloody country goes into turmoil, even to the point where some memory sticks I’d ordered had been delayed. No, seriously.
[quote]
As a valued customer we are e-mailing you today to notify you that your recently placed order may be delayed due to the adverse weather conditions that are being experienced in most parts of the UK.
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It did, however, allow me to take some purdy pictures…
In other news, the bathroom scales are fixed. I weighed less than the last time I checked, which is a bonus I suppose.
My “disks” database has grown in size since I last mentioned it. It has expanded onto its 8th folder, and currently contains information on 1,191 disks. I am shocked, that me, the master of mess, has been able to organize something something that just simply WORKS. It would be nice to get a simple search option for it, but that’s not a high priority, as it currently works perfectly.
Well , as I’ve typed this after coming off a nightshift, it’s safe to assume I’ll be in bed shortly.
