Disk Backups

[Gary Weimer 253-7796]

In article <12397 at ibism.uucp>, rrg at ibism.UUCP (Renato Ghica) writes:
|> Can any kind soul tell me the best way to make a physical copy of a 
|> disk (including all the filesystems on it ?) to another disk ?
[tar doesn't work]
|> dd only lets me do one partition at the time
|> I don't have volcopy on my SPARCstation ver 4.1.1
[looking for VMS BACKUP/IMAGE equiv]

1) dump | restore (designate stdout for dump file & stdin for restore)

2) if the drive geometries are identical, you can use dd to copy the 'c'
partition (the whole disk). Both disks should have all partitions
umount'd before doing this. I just used this when I was replacing a 1.2G
drive that was getting flaky. I wish I knew how long it took. I had to
go home while my wife would still let me in the door (every once in a
great while you find a disadvantage to marriage :-) ). I didn't think
about putting 'date' in the input buffer until I was half-way home :-(
NOTE: drive geometries MUST be the same to do this.

BTW: If you're trying to install a second SPARC I+ (and probably other
machines as well), you can connect the two machines via the SCSI bus,
bring up second machine to the > prompt (halted), and then access it's
drive via the first machine. Making the drive id's different is left as
an excersize for the reader.

weimer at ssd.kodak.com ( Gary Weimer )