Disk Backups

[Craig A. Zook 283-4206]

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 ?


The method I use is as follows and is for Sun computers.  If other
computers have the dump / restore command then this will probably work
for them.  This method will transfer a partition of data.  It assumes 
sd1c is the source and sd2c is the target.


1) Get the new disk ready (i.e. format, partition, newfs)
2) umount the partition to be copied (so no changes will occur during
   the copy.
3) mount the target partition at /a (someplace users don't have access)
4) execute the following:
   dump 0f - /dev/sd1c | (cd /a; restore rf -)
5) cd /a
6) rm restoresymtable
7) cd /
8) umount /a
9) fsck /dev/rsd2c
10) the target partition should now be an exact copy of the original.

Using SMD drives I am able to transfer about 800Mbytes / hour.

This method can be used to transfer data across a network.  The target
partition must be NFS mounted on the machine with the source partition.
Then run the dump/restore program on the machine with the source partition.
This is much slower (200 - 400 Mbyte / hour) but it seems to work.

--
Craig Zook   -   zook at sweetpea.jsc.nasa.gov
Systems Engineeering and Administration
McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Corp. - Engineering Services Division
(713) 283-4206