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Re: backing up a drive



On Tuesday, 21 March 2006 14:40, John Fleming wrote:
> >> > A pointer: take a dump of the entire drive (dd if=/dev/hda) and not
> >> > just
> >> > partition.
>
> Please tell this newbie additional info that's probably obvious to everyone
> else - What all should be stopped while dd is doing it's thing, IOW stop
> mail server and anything else that might be actively trying to change files
> during the dd?  What all comes to mind - mail, cron, Apache...others??
>
> What's the worst thing that might happen if active services are NOT
> stopped - a jumbled mail message or could the whole filesystem end up
> unusable in this case??
>
> Thanks - John

Dumping the root file system should probably be done in "system maintenance 
mode", otherwise know an runlevel 1, or single user mode. At the boot prompt, 
you can type "linux single" if you are using LILO. In GRUB the same thing 
should be possible, except that I haven't tried it.

Another way of doing it is to run "init 1" from a root prompt, but you may 
need to run ps to see if any services are still running.

cheers
Duncan

		
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