On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 10:16 AM, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC)
Hi,
I have a production system that runs OpenSuSe 11.2 that currently acts as a fileserver, mail gateway and workstation. This same production system is on older hardware and thus cannot boot from USB, but can from DVD/CD. The version of dd in Coreutils is 7.1.
My aim is to to upgrade this software to to the latest and greatest the hardware will allow, however before doing a fresh install, I need to preserve the user file and mail server stores i.e. non root users.
The entire system is under 2GB and given I have a a 2TB Drobo storage unit attached via USB that is owned by root, I assume this to be possible.
With the insertion of a Live CD to detect the system and attached USB connected drive array(Drobo), could I use dd to copy the system across and preserve all user permissions, users, groups etc?
A command of: $dd if=/ of=/drobo/ fsync noatime nofollow
That would enable me to then upgrade the system, restore the /home and /etc folders without overwriting any new files and then either learn to use kbackup or SSH/rsync etc to implement a proper backup to Drobo.
Possible?, snafu's?, other thoughts?
Regards Hylton
Hylton, I like to think I'm a dd expert, but I'm not familiar with this type of dd usage at all. I have never pointed if or of at directories. I see supported arguments in the man page for directory, noatime and nofollow which just confuses me even more. (With openSUSE 13.1) I can't figure out a legal syntax to use any of "directory", "noatime", or "nofollow". Basically either the man page for dd is simply wrong about those being supported options, or I have no idea how to use them. Good Luck and if you find a tutorial that addresses a use case of using dd to copy directories, please post a link here for all of our education. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org