On Fri, 13 May 2011 22:47:43 -0400, Andrey Moshbear wrote: > > Is the bs=2M important? Should one use the block size of the drive? > Speed improvement. > If you're doing a backup of a rather large disk, I duggest piping to > bzip2 or gzip. Unless the free space is random padding, even the > slightest > compression will be more efficient, space-wise, than the raw file.
You could also do dd if=/dev/zero of=somefile bs=1G rm somefile to zero the unused blocks, which should both speed up and increase compression of those areas. -- Neil Bothwick Copper wire was invented by two Scotsmen fighting over a penny!
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