On 2015-07-08 18:16, Donald Pearson wrote:
A better option if you want a block level copy would probably be ddrescue (it's available in almost every distro in a package of the same name), it's designed for recovering as much data as possible from failed disks (and gives a much nicer status display than plain old dd). If you do go for a block level copy however, make certain that no more than one of the copies is visible to the system at any given time, especially when the filesystem is mounted, otherwise things _WILL_ get exponentially worse.Basically I wouldn't trust the drive that's already showing signs of failure to survive a dd. It isn't completely full, so the recover is less load. That's just the way I see it. But I see your point of trying to get drive images now to hedge against failures.Unfortunately those errors are over my head so hopefully someone else has insights.
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