Hi David, Aaah, good - that's what I thought you meant. Yes, of course it would be best to shutdown the system before cloning the disk, but what I intend to do is just backup my running system to a spare hard drive (of identical size and geometry) in the middle of the night via a cron job. So worse case, it should be the same as recovering from a sudden power-off (which shouldn't be too bad). I may shutdown sendmail, imap, httpd and a few others guys before doing the backup since they should be the only things (of any importance) that might update important files.
Thanks to all who responded both on and off list. :) Michael Coffin, VM Systems Programmer Internal Revenue Service - Room 6527 1111 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20224 Voice: (202) 927-4188 FAX: (202) 622-3123 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: David Boyes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2002 3:58 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Cloning i386 Hard Drives - Like DDR > Thanks to all who replied. Since it's a block by block copy I A) > don't need to clear the copy-to target first, right? True, provided the source and destination are the partitions covering the entire physical disk. B) It will get the boot and > partition records, right? Yes, see above. > David, when you say it doesn't work well on the disk you are running > on, that's the disk I want to clone. What kind of problems might > I expect? Mostly consistency problems, such as corrupted/truncated files if the source disk changes while being copied to the destination. Same reason you don't DDR a pack with active page/spool on it and expect it to be a completely clean copy. Most of this sort of inconsistency is fixable with fsck, but if you want to guarantee a clean copy, then you can't be changing the disk out from under dd. -- db
