[SOLVED] Headless Backup System Drive

Items used: Parted Magic CD http://partedmagic.com/doku.php
Putty http://www.putty.org/
External Hard Drive

The Parted Magic only would connect on the 1st motherboard nic, usually eth0. PCI nics would not get an ip. Have machine set in bios as 1st boot device cd-rom (I leave mine that way). Put Parted Magic in cd-rom and hook up usb external. I used an older external. A newer western digital had issues. Let it boot for like 5 minutes. Find the ip assigned to it from your router. If you have DD-WRT you will find it on the tabs Status/Lan. Use Putty to start ssh session login userid=root and password=partedmagic You can run Clonezilla from command line by typing "clonezilla". For Instructions on Clonezilla watch vids on YouTube.

PS- the issues with the external Western Digital Drive were due to some of the software they had put on it. It you have a similar drive and wipe it clean there shouldn't be any issues.

There are several other programs on the Parted Magic cd. I was able to get X11 forwarding working on my Windows latop as well. If you save your Putty settings add a check in "enable X11 forwarding" on the left tree of putty under Connectios/SSH/X11, it's on upper right at that location. Each time you use this you can load up these settings and just change ip if it has changed. Then on Windows machine you need to install Xming and Xming-fonts:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/files/

Install them both. Then start SSH session to server ip with above settings in Putty. cd /etc/ssh and use nano to edit sshd_config. Look for 1st line in config that has "#X11Forwarding no" take off # and make line read "X11Forwarding yes". There is another line with X11Forwarding farther down on the config file but you only need to edit the 1st one you see. Then "/etc/init.d/ssh restart". Now disconnect and reconnect and you can forward X windows programs that are on the disk like gparted.... On reboot these settings will obviously be lost but thought someone might have a need.

C-ya, TekkB

PS- see any errors or have probs let me know, but I think I got it all down.
PPS- each time you use make sure Xming is running in system tray, if not start Xming.

For non eth0 systems you can use the experimental parted magic ISO at this location:

http://beefdrapes.partedmagic.com/

It will work with pci slot nics. You cannot start Clonezilla with the command "clonezilla" in cli though.
You need to use the command "ocs-live". Also, if you want to backup to one of your data disks on your omv make
a folder called backups (or whatever name you want) in the root of one of your data drives. You can mount this drive
while using Clonezilla and backup to that folder. If you use an external a 2.5 inch external powered via usb it's a
nice choice, no power cords.

Good Luck and if anyone comes across some great ideas for backup please share.

When using Clonezilla to save an image to an external hard drive Clonezilla will let you save it to the / or the a folder in the root of the drive. If you want to create and name your own folder Parted Magic has a good file manager to use while your in cli. It's called Mignight Commander and you can run it with the command "mc".

Thanks to Patrick Verner for all his good work over at Parted Magic.

For people using DD-WRT you should go to the /SERVICES tab and then add a static lease for you OMV. Click on the add button under static lease then fill in the fields, using your OMV's mac address and the ip you want to assign. Then below click on apply settings, wait til it finishes, and then click on save. This way when you use Parted Magic you will know for sure what ip your OMV will be. Your router will always assign the same ip address ,via the mac address, to your OMV and it makes it easy to find and use ssh to log into Parted Magic.... Great way to give a laptop a fixed ip on a network too, that you don't want to assign an statuc ip cuz you need dynamic ip when using it on different networks (e.g. wifi hotspot somewhere).