[Techtalk] Partitioning hard drives

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 02:26:29PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Indefatigable42 thought:
> This is a sort of general question that I started wondering about while
> trying to plan my new machine. It's going to be a dual boot system running
> Windows XP and some version of Linux (probably Ubuntu, as I know people who
> use it). Once again, I'm not sure whether techtalk or newchix is the best
> place for it.
> 
> I'm trying to figure out an efficient way to keep my system backed up. In
> terms of hardware, I wanted to get a big internal drive and partition it,
> and then get a smaller external drive to back up only the files that I can't
> reinstall from scratch (for example, software preferences, word processor
> documents, photo albums, etc.). This way I wouldn't have to back up the
> entire system or use a RAID array, and the backup drive could be physically
> isolated from the main system for safety's sake when it's not connected.
 
I would suggest using a larger external disk for your backup.  Use this to
keep versioned backups.  I use an rsync script to keep versioned backups
in a pretty small space.  Have a look at 'sync_disks' on
http://cod.homelinux.org/C/index.html .  This is set up to backup up
multiple machines on the home network to a single disk.  It uses the full
space occupied by each machine plus the changes that arise over time.

> My question is, can an external hard drive be partitioned like the internal
> one, so that the Windows and Linux backups both have partitions that match
> their own file structure? Or should I have two separate small external
> drives, one for Linux and one for Windows?

This is possible to do but is really only of benefit if you want to do the
backup of each OS _from_ that OS.  OTOH, if your winXP partitions are
readable from linux, you could just backup the whole lot from linux.  This
does have the drawback that you will lose the NTFS file details unless you
store on an NTFS partition.
 
Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
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