backup and restoring partitions You always wonder how to make a backup of a complete disk? For example to rescue the disk, or you want to save te data for later on? Or mayby to make an image and distribute it over a lot of computers? Here is how. Make a backup of a partition (this could also be the whole disk): One-to-one: dd if=/dev/hdx1 of=/path/to/image To a compressed image: dd if=/dev/hdx2 | gzip > /path/to/image.gz To mount the partition on a local directory: mount -o loop /path/to/image /mnt To restore a partition (first make sure the partition on disk is the same size or bigger than the original): One-to-one: dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx1 From a compressed image: gzip -dc /path/to/image.gz |dd of=/dev/hdx2