system cloning

[Tony Shadwick]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Alex Zbyslaw wrote:

> Philip Hallstrom wrote:
>
>>>> I have a system that we are running in production that there was an 
>>>> oversight on, and it has a single hard drive installed (32GB SCSI I 
>>>> believe), rather than a 3 drive raid5 array.  We would like to correct 
>>>> this, but we have all sorts of up-to-date packages and config files that 
>>>> we've tweaked that we would hate to just start over on it.
>>>> 
>>>> There's a tool for OSX called "Carbon Copy Cloner" that would take care 
>>>> of this for me, which is basically a series of copy commands that takes 
>>>> the filesystem from one drive to another, preserving EVERYTHING 
>>>> important, and then bless the boot volume.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> If you want two more identical drives then use dump, not tar, but you'd 
>>> have to have them sliced/partitioned up the same beforehand and it 
>>> wouldn't do bootblocks.
>> 
>> 
>> You would?  Why?  restore doesn't care where you're restoring to... you'd 
>> just need to make sure you were in / before restoring and then tweak 
>> /etc/fstab to suit...
>
> I understood the question to be how to create two identical *disks* not two 
> identical directory trees.  So unless the disks were partitioned and sliced 
> the same before you used dump/restore then you wouldn't end up with identical 
> disks.  If all you want is two identical directory trees, then slicing and 
> partitioning are irrelevant.
>
> --Alex
>
>
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Partitioning IS releveant in my situation, but they don't have to be 
perfectly the same.  We have a rather unique system setup on that box to 
where /var is insanely huge compared to the average boxen.  There are a 
few other requirements, but being perfectly identical isn't one of them. 
It needs to be running the same directory tree upon boot, and be basically 
the same system.