David Brown wrote: > On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 09:57:11AM -0800, Gus Wirth wrote: >> Brian wrote: >>> This whole thread is making me feel ok with rsync to a separate drive, >>> or tar and gzip what you care about. >> >> I have multiple identical hard drives and I just dd my entire drive. Of >> course, that's not a method suitable for use in a 24/7 environment. > > What if you lose power in the middle of the 'dd'? In fact, what if > something changes the source filesystem in the middle of the backup. > > Doing it from a rescue drive isn't a bad solution, except for having both > your source and your backup in the same machine at the same time.
The source drive is not in use. Specifically, I shut the system down and then reboot using Knoppix. I then use Knoppix running as a live CD to do the dd. This takes about 25-40 minutes for a 60GB drive, depending on which drive I am backing up to. The reason for the time difference is that for supposedly identical disks (same model numbers), the manufactures changed something over the matter of a few months that made some drives significantly faster than others. I have removable drive trays in my system that I use to swap the disks in and out with, which avoids the USB problems and allows me to check my disks with smartctl. I realize errors (or lack thereof) reported by smartctl isn't the best for detecting hard drive problems, but it's better than nothing. If I'm really paranoid, I'll cmp between the two disks, which I do about once every other month. Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
