before I go ahead, I'd like to take an image of my HDD and I'd like to know what my options are short of taking the drive out, hooking it up via a USB adapter and using Ubuntu to do a DD of the drive.
Are there any easier Amiga way to do this or is what I'm outlining the only way?
I have a PCMCIA Ethernet card and I use FTPMount to mount a NAS device so I could image the disk directly to the NAS if there was some Amiga software to do this but I wouldn't know where to look ATM.
TSGUI can take an image copy like DD does.
Stable:
http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/tsguiLatest:
http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/tsgui.lhaThe latter has an option to resume a copy process if the Amiga crashes in between.
However, IMHO an image copy is not a good backup because you are bound to the exact size of the backed up drive. You cannot restore it to a smaller drive and if you restore it to a larger drive, the additional space is lost.
You should rather make a file backup. It takes less space, creation is probably faster and you are flexible in partition size.
For each partition enter these two commands:
cd drivename:
lha -erax a nasdrive:backup_drivename_22-jun-2011
You might also want to add a 'z' to the options (i.e. -eraxz) which means that the archive will not be compressed. Compression needs a lot of time.
To restore the backup, prepare and partition a new hdd and then for each partition enter these commands:
cd drivename:
lha -xa x nasdrive:backup_drivename_22-jun-2011
(for that you need lha, tcp/ip and ftpmount on your boot disk of course).