How can I can clone or ghost my system drive to restore it to a bigger HD?

Question

How can I can clone or ghost my Ubuntu System drive to restore it to a bigger HD? Something like Norton Ghost does with NTFS or FAT on Windows.

Solution 1

Clonezilla is the closest free option to Ghost.

The underlying tools it uses, partimage and ntfsclone, understand the underlying filesystem. So unlike a simple low-level copy (dd) which copies all bytes, they only copy the used space on the filesystem and its metadata. This results in a much smaller disk image.

Solution 2

If you want to move your data to a new harddrive, the Simple Backup Suite can make it very easy for you. Just backup your data, then install Ubuntu onto the new hard-drive and restore from your backup.

If what you really want is a perfect transfer of data from your old harddrive to your new one, you can use the "dd" command-line tool to easily transfer the data. There's a great discussion of this technique on Server Fault.

Comments

[Jeremy]

I just took a look at the SimpleBackupSuite that Ryan mentioned, it looks pretty awesome actually.

[Admin]

Do you mean like. If i have 40GB disk, and my system is using 10GB and 30GB is free. while using dd it will write 40GB to given usb/dvd/cd? Or it will only write 10GB?

[brasofilo]

The stability and reliability of this package is questionable. As of 6/14/2011 there were 48 open bugs and little sign of development. A second bug reporting site shows signs of development. (signs are dead in the second site as well)