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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org