Re: Making an image of my HDD
On Friday 01 August 2008 10:15, Johannes Wiedersich wrote:
> On 2008-07-31 21:55, Michael S. Peek wrote:
> > Hello gurus,
> >
> > I'm considering doing some dangerous tinkering with my laptop. I have
> > regular backups of /root /boot /etc and /home, but would like to make a
> > complete image of the drive as well. Ideally, what I want to do is boot
> > from a cd, dd the drive to a file on my workstation via ssh in such a
> > way that I can dd it back later if anything goes wrong.
>
> IIUC, you 'just' need a backup of your system. I'd recommend to rsync
> your data to your backup like
>
> rsync -ax / user@workstation:/backup/dir/
Does the -x option mean that it will not read mounts like /dev, /proc and
such?
>
> Do this for all partitions of your hard disk.
>
> (rsync runs over ssh)
>
> In case you have to restore in worst case you'd have to
> 1) reformat and repartition your hard disk (keep a reference of your
> partition info!)
> 2) rsync the other way round
>
> This is faster than dd, because only the actual data are transfered,
> while dd transfers all the empty space as well. It also saves (a lot of)
> disk space on your backup system.
>
> In most cases it is *much* faster than dd, since it's rather unlikely
> that you'll break your whole disk, ie. wipe all the data on disk. In
> this case, the restore process will only have to replace those files
> that are actually changed, ie. broken -- typically only a tiny fraction
> of your disk.
>
> YMMV, take care,
>
> Johannes
--
Shachar Or | שחר אור
http://ox.freeallweb.org/
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