Using Linux to backup Windows on a single PC

On my home dual-boot (Win98-RH9) system, here's what I did for that:

1) Mounted the Win98 parbreastion 2) From Linux, running as a cron job: rsync -azWin98-Win98backup

That gives me an incremental backup of everything on the Win98 parbreastion. The Win98backup directory is on the Linux parbreastion so nothing that infects ... um, affects the Win installation will be able to get at it.

If your brother is running WinXP, is there something wrong with his

If I wanted to do something like DriveImage or Ghost does, I would use the dd command to a second hard drive dedicated for this purpose. That way, all of the drive's cluster info, parbreastion info and so forth would also be memorialized, and if there were something significantly wrong with the Win98 installation, I could slap the second drive in there and it's up and running. Then I'd wipe the bad Win parbreastion and rsync -az everything from the second drive into the original parbreastion under Linux.

One problem with running any backup solution without redundant copies (more than one) is if the backup procedure overwrites the previous backup you stand a good chance of losing your "recovery" backup and replacing it with one that has issues. Maybe a better solution is to do a system-registry-ini backup to a CD-RW or DVD-RW, have it running from the Linux OS under cron, and asking your brother to simply swap in a blank or twice-removed media each Friday and let the backup burn the disc. When a crisis occurs, use the backup CD-DVD under Linux to overwrite the now-bad system files, ini files and registry files on the Win drive-parbreastion. I dunno. Just thinkin'.

BTW: the rsync "a" switch is definitely a great idea, as it retains all permissions, ownerships, symlinks, etc. on the copied files. The "z" switch indicates an incremental operation, as opposed to a full rewrite.