quick backup on samba share

The following are instructions on how to backup an entire partition from a network connected machine onto a samba share. The backed up partition can be from Windows or Linux. The samba (cifs) share can also be a Windows share.

Samba machine is at 10.123.45.3 and share name is void.

• Burn sysrescuecd on a disc
• Boot sysrescuecd on the machine to backup
• Press enter at boot prompt
• dhclient eth0 (assuming it only has one network interface)
• mount.cifs \\\\10.123.45.3\\void /mnt/backup
• partimage
• select appropriate partition, backup to file /mnt/backup/snit, no compression (where snit is backup file name)
• wait

Do not disable file splitting, keep it at 2GB default. I'm not sure why but it won't work if you don't split files.

It may be a good idea to compress the resulting files afterwards using 7z (or whatever) if you're short on disk space. You could use compression directly from partimage but I like to keep backups as fast as possible (and my samba server has a faster CPU than most machines I backup from).

Restoring the partition is done in a similar manner. Just choose restore instead of backup to file in partimage first menu.