How To Clone And Backup Your Hard Disks/USB Drives/CDs & DVDs In Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/Linux Mint 13

In this tutorial, we will see how to clone hard disks, USB keys, CDs/DVDs, etc. in a system running Ubuntu/Linux Mint. There are many tools for copying data under Ubuntu, but in this article we will see only two.

1. Mondo Rescue

Mondo Rescue is a command line utility that allows users to backup/restore from/to hard disk partitions, usb flash drives, CD-R/RW disks, DVD disks, etc. To install Mondo Rescue in Ubuntu 12.10/12.04 or Linux Mint 13, open the terminal and run these commands:

wget ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org/ubuntu/`lsb_release -r|awk '{print $2}'`/mondorescue.sources.list

sudo sh -c "cat mondorescue.sources.list >> /etc/apt/sources.list" 

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get install mondo

To start it, run this command:

sudo mondoarchive

Select now the media where you want to store your data:

Then follow backup instructions.

2. Clone Disks with the DD Command

You can also use the dd command line utility to backup your disks. Here are some examples:

- To clone a partition to another parition, use this command:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda2 bs=4096 conv=noerror

- To copy a whole disk to another disk, use this command:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sda3 bs=1M conv=noerror

- If you want to copy your partition to an image file, use this command:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/path/to/backup-file.iso bs=4096 conv=noerror

- To copy a CD, run this command:

dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/path/to/backup-file.iso

- To copy a DVD, use this command:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=/path/to/backup-file.iso

Mount, Encrypt, And Manage Disk Images/Hard Disks With eMount - Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/Linux Mint 13

eMount is a free tool with GUI that allows Linux users to easily manage disk images and hard drives. For your right to privacy, you can use eMount to encrypt your files and keep them secure from unauthorized access, which is very important when working on computers shared with other users. You can also use eMount to mopunt/unmount disk images and physical hard disks.

Here are some features of eMount:

Encrypt hard drives and disk images

Create encrypted disk images using these file systems: ReiserFS, XFS, ext2, ext3, ext4, NTFS, FAT-16/32, and  HFS/HFS+

Mount/unmount iso files and other disk image formats as well as hard drive partitions

The possibility to enlarge disk images having the following file systems: ReiserFS, XFS, ext2, ext3, and ext4, etc.

For more information, you can refer to the home page of eMount here. In this tutorial we will see how to install eMount in the following Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu 12.10/12.04/11.10
• Linux Mint 13/12
• Debian 6.0 "Squeeze"

eMount Installation

The latest version of eMount is 0.11.3, you can install it with the following commands from the terminal:

   1. i386/32-bit system:

cd /tmp

wget -c http://goo.gl/DZ5pk -O emount_0.11.3-1_i386.deb

sudo dpkg -i emount_0.11.3-1_i386.deb

   2. amd64/64-bit system:

cd /tmp

wget -c http://goo.gl/3l6e0 -O emount_0.11.3-1_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i emount_0.11.3-1_amd64.deb

You can now start the application with this command:

sudo emount

For any bugs encountered, you can report it here.