Am Mittwoch, 28. April 2010 schrieb Iain Buchanan: > Hi, > > A winblows colleague said he uses a utility to backup his internal hard > drive to an external disk, such that if his internal disk fails he can > replace it with the external disk and continue straight away. > > Since I go to weird locations with unreliable power and sometimes drop > my laptop I thought it should be simple to do the same in Linux. I have > an external disk the same size, but now what? > > * I want to copy changes intelligently (ie. no dd, gparted, or > Ghost4Linux). > * I want to copy a specific device only (no usb keys, etc) to a > specific external device. > * Windows partitions can be ignored. > * It doesn't matter if the copy is not unmounted properly, eg. if > power is shut of without shutting down. > * The external disk must be able to be absent > > Can md use one internal and one external disk in a RAID 1 setup, with > the external disk not always there? Any other suggestions?
After I upgraded my laptop with an internal HDD of 500 GB, I started using my old external 500 GB drive as backup. Though of different dimensions and makers, they both have the same number of sectors. So I dd'ed the entire disk first, which gave me an exact mirror of the internal disk. I though this would be faster, because I have lots of small files in some places. But now I can update the backup by a simple call to rsync: rsync -aX --delete / /dev/<backup root partition>/ -a (archive) copies permissions, ownerships and the likes -X stops at file system boundaries, i.e. it will only backup the actual root partition, without other mounted file systems such as /proc, /dev and /home. -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' Why did the tachyon cross the road? Because it was on the other side.
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