On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 05:45:58PM -0500, Jeffrey Forman wrote: > I'm in the process of backing up my laptop and i've come to a little > problem. i want to backup the entire drive, not just a partition. i've > tried dump/restore, but it only backs up partitions and doesnt seem > fat32 friendly (i dualboot my laptop with gentoo and win2k). > > i'm trying dd, but the only way i can get it to compress is to pipe it > to gzip, but this still seems like i'm jumping through hoops. this is exactly how i'd do it, and is AFAIK the easiest way. it'd be a good bit faster to hook the drive to another machine with enough local storage to dump the image to, and skip the compression (or at the very least use gzip -1), but i realize that may not be an option.
you can do some tricks by setting blocksize and skipping (both paramenters to the dd command in addition to the input and output files) to break your disk image up into chunks which your fileserver can more easily digest (typically there's a hangup on filesize over nfs at 2G and sometimes one at other higher powers of 2 if not at 2GB (= 2 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes) dd if=/dev/hda of=/net/diskimage.1 bs=1M count=2000 dd if=/dev/hda of=/net/diskimage.2 bs=1M count=2000 skip=2000 # (i use 2000 to be sure we don't actually hit the 2GB limit by 1 byte or # something silly like that) etc. you might wish to do some experiments first to be sure that you don't miss a megabyte in there or doublestack one. that syntax should be correct but is untested and no warranty or guarantee of fitness for use is offered. _______________________________________________ Siglinux mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.utacm.org/mailman/listinfo/siglinux
