On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 11:49:33PM +0200, David Vasek wrote: >> Best way I know of to back up a lot of odd machines is to one store is >> running your favorite backup application so it dumps its data over ssh >> link to the one machine (which you have a spare of for repair purposes) >> which has the backup media attached to it. > > I agree, this is approximately what I am doing, but sometimes a directly > connected USB-attached disk comes handy.
You can use a combination of pax and dd to write directly to a USB-attached disk in a platform-independent manner. For example, to back up the contents of the directory DIR to the drive sd2, use pax -w -x cpio DIR | dd of=/dev/rsd2c bs=32b The speed of this operation will depend on the blocksize (I used 32 in this example). I suggest doing some experiments to see what blocksize is the fastest for your hardware.
