Date: 9 Mar 2005 12:26:46 -0500 From: james.cook@utoronto.ca To: "Thordur I. Bjornsson" <thib@mi.is> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Backup of hd using DD. Message-ID: <20050309172646.GA19884@b210-12.cdf.toronto.edu> In-Reply-To: <20050309171330.4c1c2ede.thib@mi.is> References: <20050309171330.4c1c2ede.thib@mi.is>
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On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 05:13:30PM +0000, Thordur I. Bjornsson wrote:
> Hello list.
>
> I had an idea about using a tool similar to dd(1) take backup's of
> entire disks.
>
> Here's my situation:
> My father has an old PII running Win98 (Don't ask don't tell... he's
> using very old financial software ;). Needless to say the thing keeps
> getting borked and reinstall of his entire setup is quite frustrating.
>
> Now I was wondering if I could simply set the thing up with all the
> programs that he needs + drivers + anti viral &c but minus the financial
> software ofcourse and the rip the disk out of the machine put in my
> workstation make an image of it and keep it safe and when the machine
> goes borked I could simply rip the disk out again put it in my machine
> and dd the image back onto the disk and restoring the "good-image" setup
> (then I would restore his financial stuff with the most recent backup
> (wich he keeps on a zip disk).
>
> Now my questions are:
> 1) When I dd the image back onto the disk:
> What about the 'free' hd space ?
> What about the bootloader for Win98 ?
> The registry &c ... ?
The bootloader, registry and all that are on the hard disk, so if you make an
image of the whole thing it'll all be preserved. The only thing I can think
of that you won't be backing up is your BIOS configuration, but that's
probably OK.
As for free space... if you've got an 80GB hard disk and you image the whole
disk, you'll get an 80GB image, no matter how much free space was on it. If
you want a more efficient way of doing things, I suppose you could put the
"base system" on a separate small slice, and just backup that slice...
but then you have to be careful to include the bootloader as well, which might
not be stored inside any slice.
> 2) How do I make an image of the entire disk using dd(1) ?
> Or should I use some other software ?
dd if=/dev/{disk to backup} of=/path/to/new/image/file
where {disk to backup} is something like /dev/ad0 (for full disk) or
/dev/ad0s1 for slice 1, and /path/to/new/image/file is where you want to put
the image.
Use the option "bs={some big number}" to dd to make it a faster (man dd for
more info).
>
> Forgive me if this is asked & answered or if I could have found this
> using google (so far nothing of use has showed up in my querys.).
>
> A pointer in the right direction would be greatly appricated.
>
> --
> Thordur I. <thib@mi.is>
> FreeBSD - Unix the way *I* like it.
> A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.
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