[Sussex] Nik's dd / Extreme Programming

[John Crowhurst]

> Morning chaps,
>
> First up, Nik, dd, for what you want, sure, do it - you do need to
> ensure that the data on /dev/hda doesn't change during the period you
> are reading from it - using a seperate disk for swap might be a good
> idea (this has obvious performance benefits as well) - you could chroot
> into a ram disk with the basic stuff you need if you want to be really
> sure about disk access - maybe I'm overcomplicating things (??)

Well I thought I'd have a look at some ideas on the net on how to do this
sort of thing, and I cam across this mini-HOWTO:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/mini/other-formats/html_single/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html

Some of it would require a bit of thought to get going, and replacing
fdisk with sfdisk for an example to build the partition tables from a
script.

Doing a full disk dd sounds very painfully slow, so instead they fdisk the
target disk, format and copy over the files.

If this is to be a daily thing, perhaps just copying over the files that
have changed would be a better option, perhaps rsync would work in your
favour there. I doubt that formatting the disk on a daily basis would be
worthwhile, unless you are going to use disks as your backup media.

> Step 1
> -------
> $> cp program.1.2 program.2.0beta

Or in MS case:
cp program.0.1.alpha program.year.alpha

> Step 2
> ------
> *wait four months*

or years

> Step 3
> ------
> Release program.2.0beta

Release program year

This sounds too familiar :P

-- 
FyreMoon
Under the moon, the chaos dragon flies.