Drive Imaging with dd

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Kareem Shehata wrote:

> On Fri, 2003-08-29 at 09:08, Robert Brockway wrote:
> > Have you considered:
> >
> > dd if=/dev/hda1 of=shuttlepod.hda1 | gzip -1
>
> I'm not entirely sure what would happen there.  The if and of directives
> tell dd to just pipe the data to the file shuttlepod.hda1, what's left
> to go to gzip?

Hmm...good point.  I was trying to get the dd stream non-interrupted
before sending it to gzip.  How about this:

gzip -1 `dd if=/dev/hda1 of=shuttlepod.hda1`

> I'm trying to take a complete snapshot of the partition so that if
> *anything* happens, all I have to do is create the partition, dump the
> data, and boot.  I'm not certain tar would capture everything, and NT/XP
> are notorious for doing interesting things with the filesystem.

I take your point about NT/XP.  I hadn't heard of any weirdness that
Linux's emulation of these filesystem types didn't cope with.  Might be
worth checking into further though.

I'm currently experimenting with tar for this purpose for the backup CD I
mentioned and I've seen no problems so far.  My test system is Win98 using
vfat.

As I'm sure you're aware the problem with dd is that what you get is an
image of the filesystem, which means when you dump the image onto a new HD
you get the old filesystem back, meaning that you may not be able to
effectively use the full size of the new drive without resizing, or
something like that.

I'm been working on the assumption that my CD will have all the tools to
make a fat/vfat filesystem when needed, and then drop the tar file
back.  The CD itself will carry doco on the procedure, etc.  I can't
recall offhand if I'd located a unix based tool to make an NTFS.  I
actually suspect not.

I'll look at including dd as alternative backup mechanism.  I suspect it
would have speed advantages over tar.

> I'd be interested in giving it a shot.  One more tool can only be a good
> thing.

Definately.

Cheers,
	Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
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