[dundee] Automatix & Ubunt

[Lee Hughes]

you right..

an improved version would be
dd if=/dev/hda bs=1024 conv=sync|bzip2 > mybackup.gzwill 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.

you can also create what is called sparse files, which maybe of help...

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..

see...

dd if=/dev/zero of=bigsparse bs=1MB count=1 seek=1048576

will give you a sparse file of approximately 1TB with only approximately 1MB on disk, which you may format as e.g. ext3 (mkfs.ext3 -F).

dunno if will help in this situation though, bziping is probably better.

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).

hmmm.interesting.





 
 [edit] See also





Nistur Effee <nistur at karate.com> wrote: 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.
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.
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
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
---------------------------------------------------
Signing out
Nistur                            nistur at karate.com


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