Disk Cloning

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 29 Sep 2009 01:07:31 +0100, krad <kraduk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> If your going to do all the partitoning manually its not to much more work
> to newfs them as well.

Partitioning can be automated, as well as newfs, which does
take only seconds on a TB-sized disk. If you want to avoid
this, doing 1:1 copies with dd is always possible and will
keep content identically; remember to copy the MBR separately
with bs=512 and count=1 from the /dev/ad{source} device.

If cloning is just a "do once" action, even partitioning
the target disk manually is a matter of seconds. If you're
going to to it many times, scripting should give a good
solution to automate it.



> You can then use rsync which is fast.

If partitions do already exist, rsync is an excellent tool,
too, I agree. Another tool that comes into mind is cpdup
which works fine with locally available and NFS mounted
drives.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...