Backup your home server to usb hdd

I needed to take backup of my server and wanted to take whole disk. I found this useful tool called dd packed out of the box in linux debian server.

Check which one you want to put in image file: sudo fdisk -l

Here we can see that I have /dev/sda as my main partition. Then to backup it on usb HDD find where your usb device is located. Usually it is under /media

Then just give simple DD command:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/usb0/backup.img

This will create .img file as big as your hard drive is, so for example my dev/sda is 120gb so it will create 120gb .img file. So make sure your usb hdd has enough free disk space.

Second thing to note is that the program will run as long as it takes, for example 160gb hdd backup took 80 minutes for me. You need to leave the terminal open for that time. You can monitor the progress by checking the file size with: ls -l /media/usb0/ and spamming that command you can see how big the file is. There is no verbose option as far as I know.