Re: make image of a hard disk

[Owen Townend <owen.townend@gmail.com>]

2009/5/26 Umarzuki Mochlis <umarzuki@gmail.com>:
[snip]
>
> from what I read, sparse files is the empty blocks/spaces. I only need the
> real data to be as it were. Thanks for the tip. I'll try this one out though
> I'm wondering if logging still works by doing it like this
> $ dd_rescue -v /dev/sda1 -l sda.log - | gzip > image.gz

Not quite, the syntax is:
$ dd_rescue [options] infile outfile
'-' can be used to mean stdin/out

Your command would be:
$ dd_rescue -v -l sda.log /dev/sda1 - | gzip > image.gz

Because it becomes a simple bitstream you can handle it any way you like.
Instead of just 'gzip' you could use 'gzip --best' or 'bzip2' or...
whatever you
like to handle the output.
If you didn't have enough space to handle the entire disk in one place you
could use something like 'tar -zL' to handle splitting the archive.

cheers,
Owen.