I use Drive Image 7 to backup my windows machines all the time -- works great. It's similiar to Ghost -- does an entire image backup for the selected partitions.

Drive Image 7 will not install on Linux, but it does understand the EXT3 file system, so I'm thinking of using Drive Image 7 to create a backup image of my MythTV installation. My plan is as follows:

1. Remove drive from myth box.
2. Install drive on Windows box -- connection via USB.
....(I have a USB-to-IDE cable)
3. Boot windows box
4. Run drive image 7 to backup myth drive

Has anyone tried this before? Is there any risk that connecting the drive from my Linux/Myth system to a windows system will cause damage to the file system?

Thanks!

I have not used Drive Image but there may be alternatives that suit you needs. At work I use Ghost from time to time. It allows you to create several bootdisks. You can create bootdisks which allow you to create an image to a USB/Firewire connected DVD burner/harddisk. Or you can create a bootdisk that allows you to connect to a SMB share (Samba or Windows) and copy the image over the network. In both cases there is no need to install Ghost on the harddisk containing Linux and MythTV first. Just install Ghost on some Windows PC and use it's utilities to create the bootdisks that suit your needs.

Another option is PartImage: http://www.partimage.org/

It is an open source project with similar functions as Ghost (and possibly DriveImage). Haven't had time yet to try it myself, but it certaintly looks promising and is highly recommended by a colleague of mine.

A third option is Mondorescue: http://www.mondorescue.org/

It uses a different approach then partition imagers. It's a set of scripts which allow you to create a (set of) bootable ISO disc(s) which have the partition table and filesystem info of you backed up system and all the files you wanted it to backup. When you restore it allows you to change the partition lay-out, filesystem type, try LVM and software RAID. I use this a lot and can recommend it highly. Make sure you install the later versions of Mondo since they come with an easy to use menu driven interface.

Another alternative is the commercial product Acronis TrueImage. It not only understands Linux partitions, it can boot from a CDROM and perform a full backup over a network port or to a USB or Firewire drive. it's a truly excellent product. No connection to Acronis, just a happy customer.

Acronis TrueImage

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Thanks Willem & Liv2Cod for the pointers. Since I already own driveimage 7, and am very familiar with how to use it, I decided to try to see if it would work. To ensure that I didn't mess up my production myth box, I installed a fresh image on a spare drive and then tried using driveimage on that. Works fine on both the backup and restore side, so I will stay with Drive Image 7. The main downside is that you have to attached the drive to a windows box to do the backup, because Drive Image backup utility only runs under windows.

For anyone else that has drive image 7, and wants the details, here is what I did.

Backup:

1. Remove drive from Linux/myth machine.
2. Attach drive to a windows machine (I attached mine via USB-IDE cable).
3. Use drive image to back up the drive, as usual. Backup all 4 partitions
....(Root, Swap, Cache, Myth).

Restore. I restored 1 partition at a time -- probably could have restored all in 1 shot on the Linux box if I had booted into PQRE, but I restored from windows instead:

1. Attached disk to windows machine.
2. Run drive image
3. Restore partitions onto drive in the following order:
....Root, Swap, Cache, Myth
4. All partitions should be set to primary;
....Do not assign any drive letters to any partitions;
....Do not mark any partitions as active ("for booting OS").
5. After restore completed, move drive back to myth box and boot.

Finally, on a separate note, I confirmed that re-sizing an EXT3 partition with Partition magic 8, while attached to the windows machine, works fine. The experiment I did was to shrink the "myth" partition.

Update on Feb 26,2005: The above statement about Partition magic 8 is incorrect. Upon closer examination, I see that the resize doesn't "hold". ie: PM8 appears to go through all the necessary work to do the resize, but at the last step, the partition goes back to it's original size. Didn't notice this before.

Marc