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I wanted to make a backup of my Ubuntu (12.04) partition before upgrading to 13.04, but I've come up against a snag. None of the tools I can find can make an image of the currently-mounted drive - and, for obvious reasons, it's not possible to unmount the drive which is currently used as /. The Ubuntu partition is the only one in my system that doesn't use NTFS, and all of the boot-from-cd options I've found warn against trying to save to NTFS from a livecd.

My system is a dual-boot with Windows 7, so I figured it might be possible to use that to make the image, thereby getting around both of the problems (not having the Linux partition mounted and safely saving to NTFS) - but my Google-fu is coming up short and all I can seem to find is a) tools for imaging an NTFS partition from within Linux (the opposite to my problem) or b) tools for just reading individual files from ext (not the most helpful, as they don't give any write capabilities for restoring).

Is there any way of doing this?

Jez W
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2 Answers2

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If I understand correctly what you were trying to do - i.e. make a disk image of Ubuntu from a booted version of Windows - you could have used a utility such as Macrium Reflect Free Edition (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx). This program will make an image of an entire hard disk - or one or more individual partitions. It includes a backup of the Master Boot Record (MBR) so that, for example, restoring the Ubuntu partition of a dual-boot hard disk also "refreshes" grub. Clonezilla would also work (in a live-CD or bootable-USB version) under Linux but, in my opinion, is less user-friendly than Macrium Reflect's GUI.

CentaurusA
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I am not sure if it will help you. I was also using 1204 and upgraded to 1304 without taking any backup (As no important data was there in my single partitioned drive). After the upgrade all of my data was lying there as it was never touched.

Sanjay Pingal
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