Re: backup/restore

[John Schmidt <jaschmidt@sisna.com>]

On Thursday 15 February 2007 14:28, Casey T. Deccio wrote:
> I'm looking for a solution to temporarily backup then restore a Debian
> install--preserving the filesystem contents and attributes.  The caveat
> is that the capacity of the drive I'll be restoring to is smaller (all
> other hardare is unchanged).  I wasn't sure if there was a way to do
> this with dd because of the smaller drive on the restore.  Initially, I
> used 'rsync -avH --delete --no-numeric-ids src server:dst' to send
> everything to another server and back.  The number of files (including
> links, etc.) seemed to check out, but disk usage (using 'du -cs /') was
> different before and after (block size on the filesystem was the same as
> before).  Plus I was not sure if extended attributes were transfered
> with the files.

You might want to consider mondo or partimage for this task.

John