you right..<br><br>an improved version would be<br><h1>dd if=/dev/hda bs=1024 conv=sync|bzip2 > mybackup.gz</h1>will yeild a compressed backup file, which will probably smaller than your data, provding it's an uncompress volume, or in fact your data is not compressed already..norton ghost on the cheap.<br><br>you can also create what is called sparse files, which maybe of help...<br><br>you can create a unix file which is 100GB in size, but on disk it will only take the size of the data in that file..<br><br>see...<br><br>dd if=/dev/zero of=bigsparse bs=1MB count=1 seek=1048576<br><br><div>will give you a sparse file of approximately 1<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte" title="Terabyte">TB</a> with only approximately 1<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megabyte" title="Megabyte">MB</a> on disk, which you may format as e.g. ext3 (mkfs.ext3 -F).</div><br><div>dunno if will help in this situation though, bziping is probably better.</div><br><div>again, backup
of linux filesystems can either be done with tar, or cpio gives you more control and backups weird files (/dev inodes etc etc).</div><br>hmmm.interesting.<br><br><div><br></div><div><br></div> <div><a name="See_also" id="See_also"></a></div> <h2><span class="editsection">[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sparse_file&action=edit&section=1" title="Edit section: See also">edit</a>]</span> <span class="mw-headline">See also</span></h2><br><br><br><br><br><br><b><i>Nistur Effee <nistur@karate.com></i></b> wrote:<blockquote class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> I tried to do something similar recently, backing up 2GB SD cards that I use for my phone, I found that dd copies bit for bit, so I ended up with a 2GB image file, which was no good as I had 1.4GB of data and a 1.4GB DVD to burn it to.<br>The problem with your dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/usb/backup is that you would have to own a
usb device of equal or greater storage as your current partition, even if you only use 500MB of it. What I used previously (never needed to restore, so I don't know whether it actually worked) was to tar/gzip everything into seperate files, so I had backup-09.08.07.tar.gz which contained the main file system, apart from /usr /etc /home (it had /proc /dev but they were empty dirs) and then backup-etc-09.08.07.tar.gz backup-usr-09.08.07.tar.gz backup-home-09.08.07.tar.gz for the other directories needed.<br>I agree this is also long winded and difficult but means you don't end up attempting to create a 300GB backup file for 500MB of data<br>Somebody correct me if I'm wrong but I believe this would also same perms, access dates etc so if needed, the system *should* be an exact copy<br>---------------------------------------------------<br>Signing out<br>Nistur nistur@karate.com<br><br><br>-- <br>_______________________________________________<br>Get
your free email from http://mail.karate.com<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>dundee GNU/Linux Users Group mailing list<br>dundee@lists.lug.org.uk http://dundee.lug.org.uk<br>https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/dundee<br>Chat on IRC, #tlug on dundee.lug.org.uk<br></blockquote><br><p> 
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