When my laptop display died I had to find a way to continue my life work using an old laptop so I started searching for a way to create an image of my broken laptop on the old one, work on it and then transfer it back to the new laptop when it will be repaired (still not until a few weeks). My initial though was to use the backup mechanism to an external disk which I am using to backup data regulary but the restore process assumed an empty destination. Finally I have found these very nice commands using rsync:
1. update the image on the external hdd (works as a backup)
rsync -ax --delete /home/ /media/whiteBackup/backup/black/home/
2. update the image on the old laptop from the external backup (works as a restore)
rsync -ax --delete /media/whiteBackup/backup/black/home/ /home/
Easy as a breeze and very fast compared to the hdup mechanism I used before. It also works with a remote server using a ssh connection.
Comments:
Doru Barbu -
Yep, the moment I saw the title I thought it had to be something rsync based. Since I got my eee I’ve reverted to gzipped disk dumps, with a 4gb disk it’s very quick and painless ;)