Post by howarddavidp on Jan 19, 2013 11:48:39 GMT 7
Hello,
I only have a n5200pro to test on, but I would assume what I have done would work with any model.
I recently soldered on my board a VGA header, so with a USB keyboard I can use it like a PC.
I have several DOM's on order, so I wanted to be able to make a backup of my DOM before I go to work on mods and changing stuff. I tried Acronis TrueImage products, 2013 home, Disk Director 10, 11, workstation, etc. The newest builds would start to boot, but eventually error'ed out and I never was able to get a backup to run.
Then, I decided to give Clonezilla a try. It is linux based afterall, so I thought this would be my best shot to get a working clone of my DOM. Here is what I downloaded and burned to a CD (stable releases (.iso/.zip) - 2.0.1-15):
clonezilla.org/downloads.php
I had already went into my BIOS and made the 1st boot device a USB-CDROM, and the 2nd device was a USB-stick, and the 3rd device was the DOM, in my case an AFAYA 128MB IDE. From here, things went VERY WELL. Not only did it see my DOM, it saw all my disks, and it even saw the LVM array, so I could have made a backup of the entire NAS with the raid array intact, or I could have made images of any of the disks individually. Acronis does not do that!
The only tip I can offer with Clonezilla is to NOT boot up with your USB stick plugged in, because it will ask you to insert the device you wish to use for images. If you do this, just unplug and replug your USB stick, that worked for me.
So Clonezilla saw all 7 partitions and backup them up. My total size of image was only 36MB. I can't wait for another DOM to show up so I can test the restore ability. I can say it was painless, just follow the prompts and choose the defaults for everything. I have never used Clonezilla before, so I was not sure what I was doing, but it looked like it worked, time will tell.
I will make a Google Album with all my screenies.
David
I only have a n5200pro to test on, but I would assume what I have done would work with any model.
I recently soldered on my board a VGA header, so with a USB keyboard I can use it like a PC.
I have several DOM's on order, so I wanted to be able to make a backup of my DOM before I go to work on mods and changing stuff. I tried Acronis TrueImage products, 2013 home, Disk Director 10, 11, workstation, etc. The newest builds would start to boot, but eventually error'ed out and I never was able to get a backup to run.
Then, I decided to give Clonezilla a try. It is linux based afterall, so I thought this would be my best shot to get a working clone of my DOM. Here is what I downloaded and burned to a CD (stable releases (.iso/.zip) - 2.0.1-15):
clonezilla.org/downloads.php
I had already went into my BIOS and made the 1st boot device a USB-CDROM, and the 2nd device was a USB-stick, and the 3rd device was the DOM, in my case an AFAYA 128MB IDE. From here, things went VERY WELL. Not only did it see my DOM, it saw all my disks, and it even saw the LVM array, so I could have made a backup of the entire NAS with the raid array intact, or I could have made images of any of the disks individually. Acronis does not do that!
The only tip I can offer with Clonezilla is to NOT boot up with your USB stick plugged in, because it will ask you to insert the device you wish to use for images. If you do this, just unplug and replug your USB stick, that worked for me.
So Clonezilla saw all 7 partitions and backup them up. My total size of image was only 36MB. I can't wait for another DOM to show up so I can test the restore ability. I can say it was painless, just follow the prompts and choose the defaults for everything. I have never used Clonezilla before, so I was not sure what I was doing, but it looked like it worked, time will tell.
I will make a Google Album with all my screenies.
David