archiving and restoring disk images...
lists at battleface.com
lists at battleface.com
Tue Dec 9 15:06:50 PST 2003
Thanks, Dan. I'm thinking this whole process over based on what you've
said. I've never tried storing a disk as an archive, so I thought I'd
try it on for size.
Thanks for your point of view. Very helpful.
Alex
On Tuesday, December 9, 2003, at 05:26 PM, Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (Dec 09), lists at battleface.com said:
>> I dumped a disk image of my root partition like this:
>>
>> dd if=/dev/da0s1a | gzip -9 -c > where.ever.gz
>>
>> Does this include the boot sector? In other words, if I need to
>> restore this disk image I can do the reverse and the boot sector and
>> root partition will be back to that state. How should I go about
>> this, if what I'm saying is valid? Can I do this in single user mode
>> or should I boot from CD and go from there? I haven't needed to do
>> this yet, but I want to know how. If dumping the root partition like
>> this is not a good means of backing up, please say so. What would you
>> recommend? I tar most everything else.
>
> The first BSD partition includes the disklabel partition and the boot
> blocks for that slice, but will not contain the MBR or fdisk partition
> table. Something like "dd if=/dev/da0 of=mbr count=1" would do that.
>
> To restore the disklabel partition you'll need to dd your where.ever
> dump to /dev/da0s1, since on a new disk there won't be an 'a' partition
> to write to. After the dd is done, the 'a' partition should appear.
>
> I usually either use dump or tar to back up my root partition, and use
> sysinstall or a bootable CD image to fdisk and disklabel new media
> before restoring. That way I can change the partition sizes if my new
> disk is larger/smaller than the original.
>
> --
> Dan Nelson
> dnelson at allantgroup.com
>
>
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Alexander Sendzimir 802 863 5502
Mac Tutor of Vermont, LLC info @ mactutor . vt . us
Colchester, VT 05446
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