You can pipe the output of "dd" through gzip and compress the disk image. It will be many times smaller. But in this case, where the drive is actually making nose, I would ASAP do a dd copy to another drive (an SSD) and then put the new drive in service. Make a second backup copy later.
In fact if there is important data on the drive copy it now because a drive making noise might not last long enough to do a full dd copy. On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 3:49 PM Jon Elson <[email protected]> wrote: > On 04/06/2020 04:10 PM, Glenn Edwards wrote: > > Jon > > > > The drive is 500Gb SATA and I can hook up several. > > > > I 'man dd' on the old Ubuntu 8.04LTS and seems to be just a file copy > > service. But I will try your suggestion when I boot off a LiveCD as this > > makes sense not to disturb the Hot drive. > > > > > No, dd does not copy "files", it copies every block on the > partition or whole drive, block-for-block. > LILO or GRUB know the exact block location of the kernel and > kernel loader, so only a dd copy > will end up with those working immediately. Since the dd > copies all the unused blocks on the drive, it can be quite a > bit slower on a mostly empty disk. There are some > blocksize options that make it run faster. > > If you create partitions and then do a cp of the old file > systems to the new disk, the kernel and loader > will be in different block locations, and LILO or GRUB will > not be able to boot the OS. There is a > way to fix this by booting from the live CD, but it is > getting into guru territory. > But, if you copy to a smaller disk, or want to change the > partition sizes, then that is what you have to do. > > Jon > > > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > -- Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
