Back Up/Restore Hard Drives And Partitions With Ghost4Linux
Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme
This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with Ghost4Linux. Ghost4Linux is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are compressed and transferred to an FTP server instead of cloning locally.
I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!
1 Preliminary Note
I've tested Ghost4Linux by letting it back up and restore the /dev/sda1 partition of my Ubuntu Edgy Eft desktop. The backups are done via FTP, so we need an FTP server, preferably in our local network because large amounts of data might be transferred. If you don't know how to set up an FTP server, you can find two examples here:
- https://www.howtoforge.com/proftpd_mysql_virtual_hosting
- https://www.howtoforge.com/pureftpd_mysql_virtual_hosting
You need an FTP user plus his password, and make sure that this user's quota is big enough because the images that are created can be some GB of size, depending on the size and usage of the partitions that you back up.
In this tutorial, my systems are in the 192.168.0.0 network, and I have a DHCP server on my router (192.168.0.1). My Ubuntu desktop is assigned the IP address 192.168.0.213 by the DHCP server. My FTP server has the static IP address 192.168.0.100, the FTP username is exampleuser, his password is howtoforge.
The DHCP server is optional, all this works with static IP addresses, too.
2 Get Ghost4Linux
First we must download the Ghost4Linux iso image from http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l and burn it to a CD. At the time of this writing the current version is 0.21, so we download it from one of these mirrors.
3 Configure The FTP Server
"Configure" might be the wrong word, but we must log in to our FTP server (in this tutorial 192.168.0.100) with our FTP user (in this tutorial exampleuser):
Once we are logged in, we use our FTP client to create a directory called img since this is the default directory where Ghost4Linux will store the backups (of course, you can specify a different directory in Ghost4Linux, but I use img in this article):
4 Boot Ghost4Linux
Next we insert the Ghost4Linux CD into the CD drive of the system we want to back up (for example, your Ubuntu desktop) and make the system boot from the Ghost4Linux CD (you might have to change the order of the boot devices in the BIOS so that the computer tries to boot from the CD before the hard drive). Ghost4Linux comes up with this screen. Hit ENTER to boot:
After Ghost4Linux has booted, it shows you a disclaimer, some basic instructions, and some kind of changelog. Hit ENTER each time to proceed:
