[K12OSN] Backing up a server...best methods

[Robert Arkiletian]

Les Mikesell wrote:

>On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 21:40, Robert Arkiletian wrote:
>  
>
>>What about buying a removable ide drive bay ($40) and a 200GB ide drive 
>>(~$120). Make partitions on it of the size of your scsi drive 
>>partitions. Then use dd to copy it over. Then if the scsi drives get 
>>borked/crash just use Toms Root Boot (which has fdisk, dd, mke2fs, 
>>mkswap) to copy things back onto new scsi drives. After this you may 
>>have to use Knoppix to run grub/lilo to setup the master boot record.
>>    
>>
>
>This would work, but for an image copy you should shut the system
>down and boot from CD so the contents don't change during the
>copy. 
>
Good point.

> However if you are going to do partitions separately and
>have to fiddle to make the drive bootable, you might as well
>use tar or rsync to make the copies. 
>
I didn't know dd could actually clone the entire disk and not just the 
partitions. This site explains things:

http://www.rajeevnet.com/hacks_hints/os_clone/os_cloning.html

Robert Arkiletian