Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3863 mails)

[Jim Norton <jrn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 09:21:10PM +0100, Rikard Johnels wrote:
> On Monday 02 February 2004 20:54, Alexandr Malusek wrote:
> > Rikard Johnels <rikjoh@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > > I am trying to back up a 6 gig harddrive with "dd"
> > > ...
> > > dd: writing to '/mnt/image.dd': File to large
> > > 4195234+0 records in
> > > 4195234+0 records out
> > >
> > > Is there a easy way to get around the problem?
> >
> > Use the skip and count options of dd to save the partition in several
> > files.
> >
> > > How do i fix the system for larger files?
> >
> > Which network FS do you use?
> >
> > > The source FS is NTFS
> > > The targer FS is ReiserFS (on the network disk)
> >
> > Both can handle files larger than 2 GiB, see the Large File Support
> > chapter in the Admin Guide.
> >
> > --


Would using DD be a good way to backup/restore a system from bare metal?
For example. I have a system running and configured with a few years of configuration
changes etc. If I lose a drive and have to rebuild from scratch after intalling the base
system from CD's it would be darn near impossible ( in a small amout of time ) to get the
system fully configured as it was.

What if I did a DD of my entire system ( all partitions ) and then reinstalled from the
SuSE CD's and simply wrote out the dd image files appropriately?

Is this a good idea? If it could work, what would be some pointers to doing it? 
I really don't use DD much ( only in the old days to create bootable linux floppies ).




-- 
Jim Norton - http://www.jimnorton.org
  2 + 2 = 5 for large values of 2