Backup software which backs up the file system structure only...

[amc6010]

I'm currently trying to plan how I'm going to partition my system for when I install Linux.

Ideally, I want to have all of my data on one partition. But I'm also worried about the file system being corrupted in some way, and losing all my data in one go.

So I'm considering having my data spread across several partitions, so that in the case that the file system gets corrupted on one partition, I haven't lost everything.

What I wanted to know is if there were any utilities which creates a copy of the index of the file system (I'm not sure what the correct terminology for this is, "file allocation table" perhaps?)

So in the event that my file system gets corrupted, I could replace the file system indexes with a backed up copy. And yes, although I know that would mean that the indexes could potentially have incorrect information, I don't intend on moving the data around much, so the majority of it should be recoverable.

Are there any such tools that can do this?

[bigrigdriver]

Since you haven't installed Linux yet, you may want to investigate file system journaling. The Linux file system is ext2, the journaled version is ext3 (depending on the option you choose, you either journal the file metadata, such as file name, location, etc, or you journal the files themselves. Which option you use depends on how much hard disk real estate you can devote to journaling). There is also ReiserFS, IBM's JFS, and a few others. Do some research on Google, then make a choice. Currently available distros probably come with 2 or 3 on the CD (SuSE does). With journaling, if I understand it correctly, the file system is checked against the journal at bootup, and any needed repairs are done automagically.