On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 15:55 -0400, 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. But before I
> risk my precious laptop on this, I wanted to double-check my dd command
> with you guys:
>
> dd if=${device} conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | ssh -l ${user} ${host} "dd
> of=file.bin bs=64K"
You might find using an external hard disk and the faubackup package as
a cron.daily task might be more advantageous. Rationale being that
bootloaders aren't terribly difficult to reinstall, the backups made by
faubackup are accessable using standard filesystem tools (cp, ls, cat,
etc), and backups are complete and incremental at the same time.
If data has not changed from the previous backup, faubackup makes a hard
link to the previous copy of the data. This makes each day's backup a
complete backup, however, the space used on the filesystem is the same
as an incremental backup. As older backups expire, when the last hard
link to a particular file's data is removed, the old data is also
removed. You're getting the compactness of an incremental backup with
the completeness of a full backup every night.
Another thing you might look at is the Hard Disk Upgrade HOWTO. This
might also give you some prospective into other options that might be of
use in this situation as well.
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/index.html
--
Paul Johnson
baloo@ursine.ca
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