[hpetito]

My operating system is Windows 7 and it's HD failed. I want to use Ubuntu to recover my files. I haven't installed it; just running from CD. I see my hard drive and ALL the files. Is there anyway I can backup the HD through Ubuntu? I have copied and pasted in the past but I thought a backup would be much cleaner. Will an online backup work?

Thanks!

[saikee]

If the hard drive has failures you may have a problem to extract the corrupted files in a back up.

Cloning on the other hand does not involve files as the binary patterns are read and written on the backup disk.

For the former just hook up another drive and do drag and drop.

For the latter make sure you have a hard disk of exactly the same size (equal no. of sectors) or just larger. The dd command in any Linux can clone the disk faithfully. Say if your source disk is device /dev/sda and the target backup is device /dev/sdb the command is just

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

where if=input file and of=output file. Normally adding the parameter bs=32256 at the end makes it go faster otherwise one sector of 512 bytes will be read and write in every operation. 32256 is 63 sectors x 512 representing one complete track.

The only thing you must know absolutely is if=/dev/sda is the one to be read and of=/dev/sdb is the one to be written. A mistake here can destroy your valuable data.

[hpetito]

Thank you for the response, I found I can do it with dropbox; I didn't need that many files copied afterall and I do have my computer backed up as of June so I was able to save the new stuff. Not looking forward to reinstalling all my programs but it has to be done!

Thanks again