> Being a newbie (who sometimes lives in terror of what Linux can do if I > make mistake) I was fearful if possibly compressing a DD-ed partition > image might somehow corrupt something that would blow up all the > progress I've made. I realize that acquiring proficiency in Linux will > require accepting some serious screwups in the process but sometimes > going through the reinstall process from the Intrepid distro DVD can > get tedious. Anyway, with hard disk storage being as cheap as it is > these days, the speed of a straight DD-ed image is more attractive than > a more time-consuming space-saving compressed version.
i haven't followed this entire thread, but i have to say that dd is only a useful backup strategy if you will use exactly the same hard disk to restore onto. using one of a different size or geometry can lead to trouble if the new disk partition isn't sized correctly. it has to be the same number of sectors or larger, and if larger it won't use the extra space without resizing the filesystem which is another scary operation. have you looked at dump/restore? they produce output that can be stored on disk or tape. you can also do interactive restores from their images (a mini shell like environment where you can cd and ls and choose files). those dump images aren't something that you can just restore and reboot from. you need to boot into some minimal system (live/rescue cd) and then repartition/reformat/restore. if you want a bootable bare metal restore, there are some tools out there that can create bootable cd/dvd disks, but i have never used them. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
