copying "a" partitions
George Robbins
grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Mon Mar 19 07:51:14 AEST 1990
In article <20692 at dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> steve at avalon.dartmouth.edu (Steve Campbell) writes:
> Having a disk partition table on each disk pack (see chpt(8)) is a great
> improvement over having the partition layout coded into the driver, but
> there is one little drawback. It used to be possible to make backup
> copies of the root partition, 0a, by using dd(1) to copy /dev/r??0a to
> /dev/r??1a or any other "a" partition. This was fast (less than a minute
> on RA81's) and on several occasions saved me many hours of work. But now
> with the disk partition table in the superblock, you can't use dd(1) this
> way unless the two disks have identical partition tables, since the
> tables get copied, too, and...
>
> I haven't yet found a good alternative for making disk-to-disk copies
> of the root file system. Pipes using tar(1) or dump/restore are much
> slower and have other disadvantages like too much operator intervention
> being required. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Yes, this is a problem. The simple solution is just to standardize on
parition sizes and drive types, at least between the system disk and the
place you like to do your root backups.
I usually do an occasional tape dump and restore, but have used a pipe on
occasion. For a normal (7 or 15MB) root parition it's not that slow, and
as far as I can remember doesn't require any "operator intervention"...
#! /bin/sh
umount blah
newfs blah blah
mount blah
dump 0f - / | (cd blah; restore rf -)
done?
restore r is silent, restore x asks silly questions. 8-)
--
George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing: domain: grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department phone: 215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)
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