Some time ago I wrote about creating image backups (at "Ghost" Image backup), which worked pretty well for me, until now. Just recently installed the new Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala version, which comes with ext4 file system by default, and that is, the partimage application does not support it.

By looking to some forums (here) and the partimage application main page, I decided to give it a try to fsarchiver application, and seems to be working just great.

So, here is what I did (see also my previous post "Ghost" Image backup):

1) Mount the external storage

This thing you need to do manually, but it is no trouble at all, if you know what you need to do... since I was in this group, it took me a while, hehe...

In my case I am mounting a NTFS drive, so that I can transport files to multiple OS without problems (and over 4GB). Just Mac has issues with NTFS, as the drives are read-only.

# Create mounting directory
mkdir /mnt/{your drive name}

# Mount the storage
mount.ntfs-3g /dev/{device code} /mnt/{your drive name}

2) Backup your data with fsarchiver application

# substitute the drive name by the mounted name in (1)
# check the device that represents your hard drive to backup
fsarchiver -o /mnt/{your drive name}/backup.fsa /dev/{device code} -v -j2 -A

Done!