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1

System backup with dd to external hdd

rated 0 times [ 1] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1591 / 1 Year ago, tue, february 28, 2023, 8:14:21

I want to backup my whole system. I am wondering if the dd command is a good choice for that.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

For example: /dev/sda is my system partition (partition is on a ssd if that information is important) and /dev/sdb is my external usb hdd.
Is it possible to clone the whole system to a specific directory on my external hdd? Like this:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb/directory

I thought of the possibility to write my own backup-script, which makes a weekly backup of my system using the 'dd' command. Beyond that i want to encrypt my backup directory. What is a good choice for doing that? (I thought of EncFS for example).

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tocklftime

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago tonhorn · Accepted Answer

Another Solution:

Try running crontab -e and add something like the below: (see here for details)

#

# some comments are here

#

#



# rsync archive every day at midnight change /dev/null to a file name if you want to see the logs

0 0 * * * rsync –avu /path/to/source ~/rsync/daily > /dev/null



# rsync every sunday at 4am change /dev/null to a file name if you want to see the logs

0 4 * * 0 rsync –avu ~/rsync/daily ~/rsync/weekly > /dev/null



# rsync every 1st of the month use gzip to use less space change /dev/null to a file name if you want to see the logs

0 0 1 * * tar -cvzf ~/rsync/monthly/monthly_$(date +%m%d%Y).tar.gz ~/rsync/daily/

And to encrypt the folders you could do something like:

tar -cvz /path/to/directory | openssl des3 -salt > name_of_encrypted.tar.gz

And to decrypt:

cat name_of_encrypted.tar.gz | openssl des3 -d -salt | tar -xvz new_name_of_directory