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Are there any free or commercial tools to easily create Automated/Scheduled Incremental disk images? (i.e. Acronis TrueImage-like functionality).

The use case is to create a job that runs every night and backs up the entire disk to another disk (incremental backup), by creating a disk image.

After reading up a bit about it, all I could find was these:

  • Clonezilla - can't be automated as it's a LiveCD
  • dd with vcron - can probably do the job, but is a bit more DIY than what I'm looking for (i.e. a turn-key software package with GUI).
  • Just backing up the /home directory and forgetting about disk images - not quite what I'm looking for as I want to be able to just restore the image to a new disk
Danibix
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John Winds
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1 Answers1

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After having a go at installing Acronis Backup 12 for Linux, I gave up in frustration (after spending a lot of time with their tech support in India).

I ended up settling on a combination of a manual clone using Clonezilla Live CD (which I'll to periodically perform manually), and an automated (daily) rsync backup of the entire disk (with cron).

While this is not as good as my old method in Windows (automated TrueImage of the entire disk), I think it's good enough for now. I know I can do an automated dd with cron, but many people warn against doing a dd backup on the system while it's running.

John Winds
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  • The absence of a reasonable backup system (ie: full disk image with automated incrementals) for Linux is an obscene hole in the ecosystem. – James Bowery Aug 28 '23 at 18:12