On Thursday, May 05, 2011 08:01:57 AM Brunner, Brian T. wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > > At Thu, 05 May 2011 07:44:52 -0400 CentOS mailing list > > Warning: dd is not a good choise if the source and desination > > drives/partitions are *different* sizes.
> Different block mappings will also give you grief. > .:. The drives must be identical manufacturer and model, down to the > firmware revision. > dd is not a backup tool in the general sense. I do dd imaging quite frequently, and as long as everything is LBA48 capable and setup, I don't have problems copying partitions or whole drives between multiple drives of different sizes and manufacturers; even in instances between different interface technologies. This gets better once you're on an OS rev that treats ATA drives as SCSI, and CHS is no longer in play at all, which is the case in EL6 and Fedora revs around EL6. (At least I think that's correct; but it has been an awfully long time since I've done a CentOS 4 or 5 install on an ATA/IDE system, as all of my server systems are either SCSI or FibreChannel, physical or virtual). Having said that, I quarterly rotate two identical drives in this laptop; each quarter, I clone the currently operating drive to the secondary and to a dated whole-disk image file, and then swap the drives, putting the previous primary back into the fire safe for storage. This both wear-levels and tests the backups drives. I use a three-tiered approach to backups of my own laptop: 1.) Quarterly swapping drive clones as described above, using dd (which is faster than the slightly more friendly ddrescue, unless a bad sector is found) booted from rescue or live media of the OS that's installed (this provides a fast bare-metal base recovery that I can then update and restore from the rolling rsync in item 3); 2.) Three quarters of kept images along with the partition mapping (I use GPT, and thus use gdisk for this, which works better in my particular case than parted does (parted puts an inappropriate partition type on one of my partitions when recreating the partition map)) on multiple disks; 3.) Frequent rsyncs of /home and /etc to multiple drives, in rotation. This does mean an SELinux relabel might be required on a restore, but that's ok. For servers I do the same, but with annual images and more rigorous scheduling of tarballs of important files, along with rolling rsyncs (I've looked at rsnapshot, and backing up the backup can be somewhat interesting in that case). Dump/restore has its advantages, too, however. _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list [email protected] http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
