While Adam's away I wanted to update our servers to the latest version of their operating system. To do this though I first wanted to do a full-system backup. This involves taking an image (think of it as a snap-shot) of the disk array and putting it on an external disk, or some other remote location.

I'd used partimage in the past with great success, but tonight Knoppix didn't want a bar of it. I think it was crying because the disk array is seen as /dev/sda, which is usually given to external USB devices. It wouldn't detect the USB drive at all, either because hotplug is broken, or something along those lines.

I then tried the SystemRescueCd but it wouldn't boot past some screen-redraw error, which I'm guessing was caused by the onboard video chipset.

The last one I was going to try is g4l - Ghost for Linux. I didn't want to use the g4l software iteself but rather thought I might piggyback partimage off this as a boot disc. It has a range of disk and backup tools on the ISO, including partimage, and it's only 30MB.

My last resort was to install the partimage-server software on my laptop and backup over the network. My laptop finds the external disk fine, so it would have worked, but would have been slow.

It's now running nicely, even though partimage gave me a warning that /dev/sda1 was mounted - it clearly wasn't, and it didn't spit any errors after the first initial warning. I initially had medium compression turned on which was quadrupling the backup time. It's estimating about 80 minutes total time to image 220GB, of which only half has actual data.

... and only then do I get to try the actual dist-uprade :)