Quoting Bill ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Can someone please tell me the easiest and safest way to mirror > a Hard Drive, keeping all permissions, owner, groups etc. intact
Well I wouldn't call "man dd" a safe way of doing this unless you mean you want to make a bit for bit copy of the disk. If that's the case, then you don't need to worry about permissions, owner, groups etc. because it's not even going to worry about what sort of partitions or filesystems you have. I've never done it though; you're on your own. But I'll assume that you really want to copy the contents of a partition from one disk to another. If that's so, then: mke2fs /dev/new-partition which will create the lost+found directory of the correct size mount /dev/new-partition /mnt cd to the top (mount point) of the old partition (which might be /) find -xdev | cpio -damp /mnt That will copy everything in that partition, correctly. What will differ: Directories will have new timestamps and they will be just big enough for the files contained therein (the old ones may have contained more files at one time). What still needs doing: You may need to adjust /etc/fstab if the changes you make result in different device names. If this was a root (/) partition and you use lilo, you will need to boot to it (with a floppy, say) and run lilo. I'm told you can avoid booting by using chroot or lilo -r but I haven't actually done this. Cheers, -- Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44 1908 653 739 Fax: +44 1908 655 151 Snail: David Wright, Earth Science Dept., Milton Keynes, England, MK7 6AA Disclaimer: These addresses are only for reaching me, and do not signify official stationery. Views expressed here are either my own or plagiarised.