Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
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?
If you're going to dump it to an empty disk, use rsync. This will do several things -- if there are logical block errors on the target disk, the rsync will be more robust. 2: the rsync copy will be fully defragged and spatially compacted (files in the same directory will be together). dd will be faster, but the copied image will be of lower quality. dd will take about 30% to 50% as much time as the rsync solution, but when your restore your files to the new installation, the rsynced filesystem can be rsynced back to your new system much faster than rsyncing a dd'ed copy.
Regards Hylton
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