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The best Linux disk cloning software – Mephisto Backup v1.5

berkeleylugtransferred22 Comments

What is Mephisto Backup?

This program can do simple backups and syncs over a network or locally.It uses tar and rsync in the background. Mephisto Backup was made with the Java programming language. The key feature of this program is the ability to backup your system to an image and copy it to a Linux Live DVD for future restoration. The user can then take that cd and move his or her system to any PC.

Features:

1. Backup your operating system to a Live CD.

2. Restore your OS from the Mephisto Live CD. The live CD is used by Mephisto Backup to Restore your system only.

3. Displays the size of your backup ISO and TAR file after each backup job is ran.

4. Blank DVD-RW’s.

5. Sync between locations and save backup configurations.

6. Burn the backup image to the live cd within the program.

7. Backup Schedules.

Additional things to mention:

1. This program is great to use in virtual machines because you can easily generate your virtual machine to a restore disc and deploy the image to any computer!

2. A single source for everything that you have to do: Backup -> Create a disc -> Burn. All in a single application!

3. ITS FLOSS!

Links:

Main website.

Google Code.

Sourceforge.

Contact: Phillip Tribble // phillip.tribble@gmail.com

22 thoughts on “The best Linux disk cloning software – Mephisto Backup v1.5”

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  5. I wonder how it compares to mindi/mondo. That would back up an entire system to a set of cds or dvds, with the ability to laer restore the system from bare metal.

    I played with it some years ago on an ancient (by today’s standards) Athlon Thunderbird. Because of the speed, it was relatively impractical to use. Even when I was tarring stuff up to tape (which was a good enough backup system in days gone by) it would take hours to complete.

    On the positive side, I have a much faster machine now, but then there’s the drawback of having 2x500gb drives to play with. For a while, I was using rsync to backups. Hell, that’s a *lot* of CDs or even DVDs :).

  6. Take it from me it’s a good app, wholly recommended. The author is also looking for feedback so make sure to check out the README.

    ‘jk

  10. Does this back up the MBR? I was looking into apps which could clone a Linux system and a Windows system (from one machine to another), and although I found plenty of options (PING, G4L, others) only CloneZilla could do what I needed — restore an XP partition with its MBR, all from an installable DVD.

    II understand that Mephisto is is for Linux systems, and CloneZilla doesn’t have the LiveCD experience that we’re all looking for, but CZ did the job (for XP, sadly) better than the others that I tried.

  12. I chose Java because it is what I learned in school. I wanted to start programming and that is all I knew when it came time to make Mephisto Backup. It looks and acts like any other terminal application.

  13. Well, looks good, but why did it have to be Java? It is already some five years that I refuse to use Java software.

  14. How is this different from Remastersys ( http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/rll.html ), which supports Ubuntu & Debian-based distros?

    Note: this link is to the forums for both Remastersys (for cloned copies of installs & spinning your own custom distro) AND Remastersys LXDE, an LXDE Debian distro ideal for older hardware & netbooks.

    GW

  15. Hello Mike

    This will only backup the Linux filesystem on /dev/sda1 . As of now, this app does not support any partition outside of /dev/sda1 due to the issues of modifying the Gentoo live disc. The Gentoo live disc that this app uses sometimes has drives listed as hda or sda. I did the best troubleshooting I could do to get it functional with /dev/sda1. You could always modify the source to accommodate your needs for other partitions. I plan on having different partition support available by v1.7 ~ v1.8.

  16. I dual boot Win XP and Linux Mint 6. Both are on the same hard drive (100GB). Will this software clone the entire drive or just the Linux partitions? Can I port the output to an external hard drive?
    Thanks
    Mike

  17. You record disk images? Like doing something like “dd if=/dev/sda1” ?

    There are two considerations:
    1. Disks have errors in them. Copying disk images from one harddrive to another doesn’t take this into consideration. It could work, but you can get into trouble. Generally it’s better to do file backups rather than image backups.
    2. There’s a lot of garbage in the unused portion of a disk. That means images will have to be massive, even compressed. Best to wipe the unused portion of the disk with all zeroes before compressing the disk image, if you do compression that is.
    3. No incremental backups are possible with image backups. File backups allow this.

    -Steve

  18. Oops. I was originally going to mention just the first two issues. I mentioned three. Haha.

    – Steve

  19. Pingback: Einfach sicher: Mephisto Backup 1.5 (Video) » Allgemein, Software » Netbux

  20. Wow! A review in German for Mephisto Backup… viral even 🙂

    (viral in that it spreads like wildfire over the net, not that it has a virus or anything, of course) 🙂

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