Making a bootable backup (hard)disk... how?

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Warren?  Just a couple more quick questions.  You recommend:

>>   dump -C16 -b64 -0uanL -h0 -f - /usr | (cd /mnt && restore -ruf -)

I'm real curious about you suggestions for the -C and -b values.

I have what amounts to a personal workstation.  Yea, OK, it is running
mail, web, and FTP servers also, but fundementailly, it is not that busy
most of the time.  And it's got 4GB of main installed.  On average, I
suspect that I ain't even using half of that.

Given all that, why shouldn't I specify (e.g.): -C512 -b1024  ?

Wouldn't that all make the dump go faster?

Remember, I'm just gonna do like in your examples and pipe the output
of dump to restore, so whereas if I was going to tape (or even to a
.dump disk file), -b1024 would be rather wasteful, in my case all I
am wasting is a bit of kernel time (for a bit more stuff being passed
through the pipe).


Regards,
rfg