Take the 2-minute tour ×  I'd like to backup my system without
turning it off. The system clone should also able to run in an
other machine.  I've tried to "dd" the entire system partition
on another disk, after that I'm ensured that there's no
administrative tasks launched. I think I had to tell to the grub
to boot on that disk, so I've executed the command:  grub-
install  /dev/sdc1   but I got this error:  The file
/boot/grub/stage1 not read correctly.  I know that I am doing is
not very clean, so have you a good solution to reach my goals or
a idea to solve the grub problem?  share|improve this question
If you have to keep it running, that implies that it's actually
doing something. If that's the case, then it's almost certain
that the content of your system will be changing during the
backup. This makes the results somewhat unpredictable - test a
lot before using in production. –  Joe Nov 15 '12 at 0:43 add
comment  3 Answers  up vote 8 down vote accepted  There are
several options that each have tradeoff