copying hard drives

[Andrei Brezan]

On 10/06/2011 21:11, David Banning wrote:
> I am interested in copying hard drives and would like some feedback.
>
> 1. I would like a way to take peoples windows -or- unix systems and
> store each on portable hard drive as a single file - so that in the
> end I have a large, say 2TB drive with a number of peoples operating
> system backed up - that can later be restored.
>
> One concern I have is that the file saved is under a certain generic
> standard - I don't want to be in a situation down the road where I
> need to restore, but the required software to restore is defunct.
> It would be nice to have the operating system on a stick - so I
> could boot into the program from a clients computer, connect a large
> drive, and backup their entire drive.
>
> 2. I'd like a simple way to copy - my FreeBSD system to another
> drive - a clone so to speak - which I know dd can do - but I wonder
> if there is a way to do this so that clone drive can be smaller that
> the original. My thinking here is that I need to experiment with
> changes but can't do it on a live system - hence the copy booted
> from a separate machine.
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Hi,

Though it's not a FreeBSD related question, I would suggest clonezilla 
http://www.clonezilla.org/ as a good tool to accomplish your goals. I 
think it's also scriptable.

Regards,

-- 
Andrei Brezan
email<andrei693 [at] gmail.com>