Re: [opensuse] cloning a drive?

If you are going to use rsynce consider that you may want to use some additional options to make the copy more faithful to the original... rsync -a -H -A -X -S /from/ /to/ See the man page. Before going to 12.1 I used rsync to duplicate / to a spare partition (I always leave make two OS partitions on every drive - can't have too many now that disk is cheap). I then manually edited /etc/fstab /boot/grub/menu.1st to make sure it would boot, that way I could boot the upgraded 12.1 or the old 11.4. Note this was in addition to offline backups (also using rsync). If you brought a machine down to runlevel 1 it would be reasonably safe to just rsync the live machine. On Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:01:07 Carl Hartung wrote:

On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:07:58 -0800 Steven Hess wrote:

...

I am getting ready to do a zypper dup to 12.1 from 11.4 on my main desktop system. I would like to clone my current / drive to a back up disk (attached via USB). I have used pmagic for this in the past. Is it possible to do this from within the openSUSE 11.4 KDE environment?

Thanks Steven

Hi Steven,

This is exactly what I did before upgrading my system to 12.1. Good thing in my case because I just couldn't adapt to GNOME 3. After about a week I reverted back to my 11.4 installation using this method. I also used this method to store the 12.1 installation on another drive to try again later, after more updates have been released.

Notes: This procedure assumes you've got '/' and '/home' on separate partitions and that the source and target partitions are properly created and formatted. Of course, you'll want to verify and/or modify device paths and numbering to match your environment.

The basic procedure I follow is this:

Boot into rescue mode using the 11.4 installation DVD (login as 'root'; does not require a password.)

Plug in your external usb drive and wait a few seconds for it to power up and 'settle.'

cd /mnt mkdir sda1 sda2 sdb1 sdb2 mount /dev/sda1 sda1 mount /dev/sda2 sda2 mount /dev/sdb1 sdb1 mount /dev/sdb2 sdb2 mount (review and ensure everything is mounted as expected) rsync -av --delete sda1/ sdb1 rsync -av --delete sda2/ sdb2 umount reboot

Unplug the external drive when the system is 'down,' before it boots again. Replace the 11.4 installation DVD with your 12.1 media and install. You should install without touching the existing bootloader in case, like me, you decide to revert back.

The procedure I've outlined above creates proper 'mirrors' of the two partitions, keeping timestamps and permissions intact. A side benefit is each file is written in one pass, which eliminates a lot of fragmentation. You can drop the '--delete' flag if you know for a fact that your target partition(s) are empty. Finally, with rsync, the trailing '/' in the source path is important. It tells the program 'copy everything *under* the specified directory without recreating the directory, itself, on the target.'

hth & regards,

Carl

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