[madmunky]

How do I do a complete backup of my partiton so if I mess something up I can just restore and not have to worry about reconfiguring alsa etc...

Is there something free like symantec ghost which will work?

[JumJum]

You're looking for the dd command you already have.
dd if=/dev/[partition] of=[output file]

Example:
dd if=/dev/sdb2 of=/mnt/usb/backup.bin

To restore:
dd if=/mnt/usb/backup.bin of=/dev/sdb2

Boot from a livecd or another partition both when you backup and when you restore.

[madmunky]

Sweet sounds good and easy which I like

[hikaricore]

You should also be very careful with dd and read up on its usage.
An improper use of dd can result in some serious dataloss.

Perhaps someone should recommend a gui-based backup solution for new users.

[madmunky]

Ok somethings not right I did

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/xbmc/backup.bin

Now I have a 1TB drive but only have Ubuntu Mini and XBMC installed so I would guess it should be no bigger than a couple of GB but so far the backup file is 32GB and still going!!!

[madmunky]

Ok my bad I guessing im getting stuck in a loop backing up my backup file, need to backup to a usb drive or network drive not to the same partition im backing up

[topfs2]

Ok somethings not right I did

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/xbmc/backup.bin

Now I have a 1TB drive but only have Ubuntu Mini and XBMC installed so I would guess it should be no bigger than a couple of GB but so far the backup file is 32GB and still going!!!

dd takes a low level copy of the drive, so it will contain the dead data, dd won't recognise any difference between filesystem, real size and such. It just copies it all exactly as it is on the drive. So if the drive is 1TB the image produced will be 1TB.

A possible workaround is that you take 4-8gb and partion it and install ubuntu on that partion, then you can dd that partition and that partition alone, however it is still hard to get it right when you will dd back the partition.

[sisyphus]

My 2 cents. I built a pxe clonezilla server for backup. I have a number of computers on a home lan. It takes about 5 minutes to image my xbmc partition and when something goes wrong it takes 5 minutes to go back. It wasn't too hard to set up (easier than xbmc). Best thing I ever did.

[chojin]

You could also use clonezilla live, which you can run from an usb-stick or cdrom. It can send the image to another computer using a samba share, an nfs share, trough ssh, or ...

Another method is running xbmc on a diskless client (pxe boot) and the server where the diskless client resides is configured with LVM so you can easily create a lvm snapshot of the xbmc volume while xbmc is running on the diskless client, and rsync it, or use dar (disk archive, not tar) to backup it to an external disk or so.. This is how I did it.

[madmunky]

Cheers people, will give clonezilla a go

[Maxim]

Clonezilla is pretty easy to use once it's setup. There is also another project called PING (http://ping.windowsdream.com/), as well as FOG (http://www.fogproject.org/)

The above are free and open source.