Beautiful
I have had an awesome morning. I did an absolutely beautiful thing with my computer, and I'm very pleased.
It wasn't anything overly difficult -- just cool, because it taught me just one more way that Linux just rocks. You see, I've had a 15 GB partition on my laptop for Linux now for quite some time. At the time I created it, I needed Windows as my primary operating system, so I thought it would be more than adequate.
But over the past year or so my computing needs have changed, and I spend a lot more time on Linux. In particular, I've been using Linux for doing things like editing audio files, making backups of my media, and running virtual machines (like Windows Server 2003 ;P).
Unfortunately, I realized a month or so ago that I was getting *really* low on hard drive space. And I was tired of having to remember to bring the right flash drive for anything that couldn't fit on my laptop.
The problem was, the 15 GB were at the *end* of the hard drive, so there really wasn't any room for expansion. I could shrink Windows by at least 30 GB, but still I had a swap partition and a shared volume sitting between my Linux partition and my Windows -- in other words I thought it would be pretty messy to figure out how to expand without re-installing.
Then I ran across a beautiful article about how to back Linux up. I kid you not -- I've been using Linux for a couple of years now, and I still didn't know how to do anything other than copy and paste my home directory onto a usb drive or the tedious chore of making a full disk image using something like Partimage.
No, this article said something like: 1) copy your whole hard drive into a compressed folder using the 'tar' command. Make sure you use the -p option so everything stays the same. You can even do this while Linux is running, provided you exclude a few obvious places (like wherever your backup drive is located so you don't put yourself into a perpetual loop). Don't worry -- none of the excluded files are critical for system operation.
2) to restore, just unzip the files to their original location. Or if you want multiple copies of your system on different drives or computers, unzip to those drives instead.
3) if you put your OS in a different location than the original, fix a couple lines in a text file or two.
4) Otherwise, life is beautiful. Enjoy!
And I was dumbfounded.
Seriously, anyone coming from Windows knows that you have to purchase special software to do full-system backups. If you try to simply copy the files from C:\ onto a usb drive, then wipe the partition clean and try to put all the files back, it absolutely refuses to work. And there are just certain *critical* files you can't back up while Windows is running.
But Linux works perfectly. I just copied the files over to the new space created by resizing Windows. I even got a little crazy and unzipped it across multiple partitions that aren't even sitting next to each other on the hard drive -- in spite of the fact that the original OS was stored on a single partition. All I had to do when I finished was fix two simple files: fstab (the file that tells what partitions your Linux is located on) and the grub configuration file so my system knows not to look in the old location.
I booted, and everything so far has worked perfectly, as if I had never moved my operating system. And it took me less time and hassle than re-installing -- and virtually no computer down time. **jumps up and down excitedly**
I think there are definitely reasons why the more I get to know Linux, the more I love it. :)
It wasn't anything overly difficult -- just cool, because it taught me just one more way that Linux just rocks. You see, I've had a 15 GB partition on my laptop for Linux now for quite some time. At the time I created it, I needed Windows as my primary operating system, so I thought it would be more than adequate.
But over the past year or so my computing needs have changed, and I spend a lot more time on Linux. In particular, I've been using Linux for doing things like editing audio files, making backups of my media, and running virtual machines (like Windows Server 2003 ;P).
Unfortunately, I realized a month or so ago that I was getting *really* low on hard drive space. And I was tired of having to remember to bring the right flash drive for anything that couldn't fit on my laptop.
The problem was, the 15 GB were at the *end* of the hard drive, so there really wasn't any room for expansion. I could shrink Windows by at least 30 GB, but still I had a swap partition and a shared volume sitting between my Linux partition and my Windows -- in other words I thought it would be pretty messy to figure out how to expand without re-installing.
Then I ran across a beautiful article about how to back Linux up. I kid you not -- I've been using Linux for a couple of years now, and I still didn't know how to do anything other than copy and paste my home directory onto a usb drive or the tedious chore of making a full disk image using something like Partimage.
No, this article said something like: 1) copy your whole hard drive into a compressed folder using the 'tar' command. Make sure you use the -p option so everything stays the same. You can even do this while Linux is running, provided you exclude a few obvious places (like wherever your backup drive is located so you don't put yourself into a perpetual loop). Don't worry -- none of the excluded files are critical for system operation.
2) to restore, just unzip the files to their original location. Or if you want multiple copies of your system on different drives or computers, unzip to those drives instead.
3) if you put your OS in a different location than the original, fix a couple lines in a text file or two.
4) Otherwise, life is beautiful. Enjoy!
And I was dumbfounded.
Seriously, anyone coming from Windows knows that you have to purchase special software to do full-system backups. If you try to simply copy the files from C:\ onto a usb drive, then wipe the partition clean and try to put all the files back, it absolutely refuses to work. And there are just certain *critical* files you can't back up while Windows is running.
But Linux works perfectly. I just copied the files over to the new space created by resizing Windows. I even got a little crazy and unzipped it across multiple partitions that aren't even sitting next to each other on the hard drive -- in spite of the fact that the original OS was stored on a single partition. All I had to do when I finished was fix two simple files: fstab (the file that tells what partitions your Linux is located on) and the grub configuration file so my system knows not to look in the old location.
I booted, and everything so far has worked perfectly, as if I had never moved my operating system. And it took me less time and hassle than re-installing -- and virtually no computer down time. **jumps up and down excitedly**
I think there are definitely reasons why the more I get to know Linux, the more I love it. :)