[Gllug] re: system recover from 'bare metal'

[t.clarke]

Personally, I found on a SCO Unix system (no flames please !!), that the
quickest way to achieve a 'bare metal' recovery is to:
a) boot from a floppy (so the root filesystem is unmounted)
b) use 'dd' or equivalent the stream the entire naked root filesystem partition
   to tape
c) take a manual note of the exact partition size



Then if you need to recover onto another or the same, re-partitioned etc, drive,
you can simply boot again from a floppy, create the necessary partition and
dd the tape back to the new partition.

The above is over-simplified, since you will need probably also to do the
same for the boot partition and any other important partitions. Also, the
bootable floppy will need tape support and a means of reinstalling the boot/lilo
sector onto the disc.

Although a naked partition copy involves storing away, usually, a whole load
of 'empty' disc blocks which a more intelligent backup utility could ignore,
the process is still very quick since no directory structures have to be
traversed and disc-head movement is kept to a minimum.


For the fastest recovery one can also dd to spare partitions on another live
drive or even a high capacity zip drive.


Tim


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