copying hard drives

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 10 Jun 2011, 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.

I second using Clonezilla.  It doesn't make a single file, but splits 
things into 2G files that aren't as unwieldy as larger files.  Keep a 
copy of the Clonezilla CD or image with the backup.

> 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.

dd is a brute force copy method that has certain applications.  Copying 
a FreeBSD disk is better done with dump and restore.  I have some notes 
on all three of these methods in Backup Options For FreeBSD:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html