[TriLUG] making a disk image

Tanner Lovelace lovelace at wayfarer.org
Mon Feb 25 23:31:36 EST 2002


On Mon, 2002-02-25 at 22:45, Ben Pitzer wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> Hey, I'm curious if any of your out there have ever used any Linux
> software for making backup images of your file systems, perhaps
> something similar to Norton's Ghost software.  I would like to back up
> my Linux drives since I heard one of them making some rather unfortunate
> noises one evening.  I'm afraid that if I spin them down, they won't
> spin back up, and I would like to make decent backups before that
> happens.
> 
> Any thoughts you might have on a good disk imaging software would be
> helpful.  Thanks!

I have successfully used "dd" for this. :-)  It takes a bit
of knowledge about the underlying filesystem (i.e. block sizes
and exact partition sizes) and being good at math, but it
works very well.  Two summers ago I used dd to copy an entire
partition, over the network, from one computer to another 
when I swapped out drives.  I then used it to copy the
data back (making sure the new drive had a partition set
up *exactly* the same as the old one.  I even used the
"skip" parameter to allow me to break the partition into
two files (since it was more than 2GB).

Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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