Quoting Bob S <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: [snip] > Your replies lead to more questions, As I stated previously, I would like to > do an "all in one" if possible. Bootable and incrementaly up to date. > > Will dd build a bootable disk? Can that clone be updated by rsync to > make it current? >
Yes, dd can build a bootable disk. It is just a bit for bit copy of the disk partition, including the Master Boot Record (MBR). That is the point of using complete copies of partitions, to do a bare metal restore. Restoring a working, bootable system onto an empty hard drive. > I am not worried about whitespace and I would buy a disk just a little larger > than my proposed cloning. It's sole purpose would be for a backup. The whole > idea of this exercise would be to have a faithful bootable system until I > could replace my failed drive and/or be able to restore from that drive if I > had corruption/whatever on the primary drive. Now, suppose I did have a > primary drive failure and I used the backup clone to restore to a larger > disk. As Carlos pointed out I couldn't use dd to restore because the extra > space would then be inaccessible. Could the new primary be partioned first so > that it would be? > The disk needs to be partitioned before doing a restore with dd. It copies partitions, not disks. It makes partition images, not disk images. > Otto has an intersting solution which I will have to investigate. If it will > do incremental backups to the disk that would be perfect. > > Jeffrey suggests SystemRescueCD but if that is like Mondo and is a one time > thing, I don't want that. SystemRescueCD is just a very good, distribution independent rescue disk. Bare metal backups must be done from a rescue disk. It is impossible to do one on a running system that I personally would trust. It is a collection of tools for rescue and creating backups and ... AFAICT, Mondo is solely about creating bootable CD/DVDs that recreate the original disk. More automatic, less general than a rescue disk based approach. > Don't know anything about rsnapshot. Will that make > a bootable replacement drive? Is it just anothe variation of rsync? > Rsnapshot is for incremental backups. It will not make a bootable disk. It is a script (with documentation) built on rsync. I.e., a expert in a box on how to use rsync to do and organize incremental backups. Incremental backups are frequent and need to be easy, convenient, etc. Same for restores from the incremental backups. Bare metal backups are done infrequently. They need to be dependable and self contained. Bare metal restores are hopefully done very infrequently and need to be dependable. I find that dd for bare metal backups is dependable. Rsnapshot is fast and convenient for incremental backups and restores. There are other solutions that work. Jeffrey -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
