DebAWeek: partimage

It’s hard to discount how useful partimage can be. It’s an essential tool for system backup and recovery. I find myself using it for backup before making any major changes to disk. It’s got a nice curses based interface which makes it fairly easy to use.

You must be root to use partimage since it reads raw data from block devices. It can be used easily from the command line.

To save an image:
* sudo partimage -z1 save /dev/sda1 /var/backups/sda1backup.img.gz
* (note that the -z1 is the default but I usually like to specify it anyway)

To restore an image:
* sudo partimage restore /dev/sda1 /var/backups/sda1backup.img.gz