Re: [tlug] RE: Tlug Digest, Vol 14, Issue 23

[Sigurd Urdahl <sigurdur@??>]

Tribble Phillip J SrA 374 LRS/LGRTT wrote:
> Good Morning,
>
> Does anyone know a good way to backup a hard drive? dd if=/dev/had
> of=/dev/hdc will make a image exactly the size of my hard drive. Is
> there a way to use DVD and make the image small?
>
>   
Hi Phil,

the way you suggest will give you a block by block exact copy, that is a 
good way of duplicating a disk. You could also make the output a file:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/hda.image

If you want to make a compressed image you can burn to a DVD you could use

dd if=/dev/hda of=-|gzip -c  > /[somepath]/hda.image.gz

and use your favourite DVD-burner application to make a DVD with the 
compressed image on. This of course requires that the file will fit on 
the DVD (you could experiment with gzip -9, or bzip2 to get better 
compression)

But please note that using dd on a live filesystem might give you a 
inconsitent filesystem image that in a worst case scenario is quite useless.

If you want to make disaster recovery backups you should look at Mondo 
Rescue (http://mondorescue.org/), it's a GPL application that makes 
bootable DVDs (among other things) with images for recovery of computers.

kind regards,

--
Sigurd Urdahl
Linux, goofing, cooking, making fire, computer security, having a
beer. Give me good music.