backup with dd tool

[Ed Wilts]

On Mon, May 24, 2004 at 07:15:17PM +0530, Nabin Limbu wrote:
> I want to clone my hard disk with dd tool. One of my partition has about 6 GB of 
> contents. so whenI try to backup my partition with the command:
> 	dd if=/dev/sda1 bs-512 | gzip -9/mnt/sda3.dd.gz, 
> then I got error saying file size limit exceeded after backing up 2GB. It seems file size 
> has limited only up to 2GB size. Now how can I backup my 6GB content with dd tool.

Older versions of Linux didn't support files > 2GB - newer ones do.  For
older versions, pipe your gzip command into split.  Here's a fragment of
our really old backup script:
find $fs -name .nobackup -xdev | sed -e 's|/.nobackup||' > $EXCLUDE
        ( tar czl --ignore-failed-read --exclude-from=${EXCLUDE} -f -$fs \
            || touch $OOPS) | split -b 1000m - ${target}-

You may also want to look at mondorescue.org for full image-based
backups.

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program