Rsync backup of omv

rsync will not backup the boot track or partition tables.

Quote from claudio8

Can rsync be used to backup the drive on which the omv program resides or is it just for the drive containing media?

Do you need to backup the whole drive as image, to a remote computer or external drive, so you could just use the drive image later to recover from drive failure etc?

As rsync is used to handle files and not partitions and drive's partition table, so you can perform migration of drives like / or /home to a new drives with identical UUID's for partitions. But it is not a recommended manner. Different imagine backup methods instead creates the image that contains the partition table and all in the partition or drive, easy to recover as whole. But the rsync method would allow you to example recover specific directories or files in the source with remote if so required in the later on.

But as a drive that you have partitioned, and you have created a filesystem to the parition, you have a access to that partition as a directory when mounted. Rsync can't have active access to partition when it is unmounted, so you can't take the drive/parition off-line and copy it. Where with image methods you want to unmount the partition or drive so image can be created from it without any process on files in it.