I want a disk image of my computer hard drive, with both Ubuntu 16.04 (three ext4 Linux partitions /home, / and /swap within an extended partition) and Windows (NTFS partitions). I have an external hard drive formatted as FAT, which I initially thought was the best format since compatible with both Ubuntu and Windows.
However, when I have tried to create an image of the whole disk using gnome-disk-utility, I got a File too large (g-io-error-quark,0) error message. Is that inherent to backing up in FAT32 as suggested here?
Two follow-up questions:
- Can I back up in NTFS the whole disk without weird outcomes for my linux partitions? I care less about my Windows partitions -- would it be wiser then to format the external hard drive as ext4?
- Should I give up and back up (copy-and-paste) my partitions individually?
1 Answer
I do exactly this from Windows using Macrium Reflect Free
I can recommend it. Just select the partitions you want to back up when defining the backup. Don’t forget to make a recovery disc or usb stick.
Note that the Linux partitions are cloned. To my knowledge you cannot get at individual files. However you can mount the image of the Windows partitions in Windows as an additional drive (eg H:) and copy an individual file.
However the main use of this is to restore the entire image in one process. Useful to change an HDD for an SSD
