Re: Backing up all files on hdd - dd'ing
On Mon, 19 May 2003, [iso-8859-1] Roberto Sanchez wrote:
> --- Willem-Jan Meijer <meyer3@chello.nl> escribió: > Hello all,
> >
> > My hdd is producing noises I don't like so I think it's time to make a
> > backup. I want to backup all files, directories and so on, something like
> > norton ghost for M$. So that after my hdd dies I only have to replace the
> > backup and that everyting is like before the crash.
> >
> > How can I do this?
> >
>
> If you have another drive that is larger than the one your system is on, you
> can do something like this (substituting for your corresponding partitions):
>
> dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1
>
> or, to save an image if somewhere, dd if=/dev/hda1
> of=/some/other/drive/file.ext
magic ... good idea ... to keep a separate image too ( elsewhere )
problem w/ simple dd'ing
eg. dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1
a. if hda1 and hdb1 is different sizes .. you're dead
unless you like fiddling to make it fit/work
since the other option was norton ghost, i suspect
you want it done easily/trivially and that it works
b. if all files on hda1 was good today ... and you dd'd it, than
over the next day/weeks ... things get worst and nosier...
and along the way.. you keep dd'ing your supposed new
files you wanna keep .. along w/ the rest of your files,
you might be saving the new files, but with a degrading/dying
disks, you have a high probability your good data on backup is
being wiped out by the worsen'ing bad disks' dd'ing
if you are like most people w/ 40GB or 100GB or 1TB of disks
space and only using 10% of it... why are you wasting 90% of your
time dd'ing "unsused" space to backup ??
c. find | tar or equivalent is 10x better/faster/easier than dd'ing
== use incremental backups ... and multiple copies of it and never
overwrite last weeks or last months data, unless oyu are willing
to forever lose it .. ( ie.. you know your current system is clean and
up to date with no missing inodes of files )
c ya
alvin
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