FSArchiver - Filesystem Archiver for Linux

FSArchiver is a system tool that allows you to save the contents of a filesystem to a compressed archive file. The filesystem can be restored on a partition that has a different size, and it can be restored on a different filesystem. Unlike tar/dar, fsarchiver also creates the filesystem when it extracts the data to partitions. Everything is checksummed in the archive in order to protect the data. If the archive is corrupt, you just lose the current file, not the whole archive.

FSArchiver can extract an archive to a partition which is smaller that the original one as long as there is enough space to store the data. It can also restore the data on a different file-system, so it can use it when you want to convert your file-system: you can backup an ext3 file-system, and restore it as a reiserfs.

FSArchiver is working at the file level. It can make an archive of filesystems (ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, ntfs, ...) that the running kernel can mount with a read-write support. It will preserve all the standard file attributes (permissions, timestamps, symbolic-links, hard-links, extended-attributes, ...), as long as the kernel has support for it enabled. It can also be used to archive and extract ntfs filesystems.

Installation:
OpenSuSe user can install FSArchiver using "1-click" installer - here
Fedora user can install FSArchiver using yum: yum install fsarchiver

Here is how to use FSArchiver to backup a partition of your disk partition. Let's consider you want to take backup of on /dev/sda8 and you want to back it up to a file on /mnt/backup. You can run this command from terminal:

# fsarchiver savefs -v -a /mnt/backup/nikesh.fsa /dev/sda8

Here is how to restore a filesystem from an archive when there is only one filesystem in that archive:

# fsarchiver restfs /mnt/backup/nikesh.fsa id=7,dest=/dev/sda8