[Suns-at-Home] SunOs - Disk clone

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- On Sun, 6/22/08, martin nichols <mjnichols@dsl.pipex.com> wrote:

> My question is can I somehow copy the entire disk so that
> in the event of the 
> disk drive failing I can rebuild the system.
> The drives in both the IPXs are the same - SUN424.
> I have an Archive Viper QIC150 tape drive.
> An Exabyte EXB-8500 tape drive.
> A SUN CD ROM drive.
> A non-SUN SCSI external drive box and some SCSI disks in
> the 1 to 2 GByte size 
> range.
> Network cables +AUI -> 10baseT adapters.

There's lots of ways you can do this. dd is the simple, obvious option - you can dd the disk to an image file on either an NFS share, or an external hard disk. Then, boot from installation media and dd it back. Or, you can save yourself a step, and take the hard disk out of the "target" IPX, put it into an external SCSI box, and just dd disk to disk.

You can also make backups on tape, ufsdump should be available in that version of SunOS. So, you can dump the filesystems to an Exabyte tape, then ufsrestore them to the other disk. dd is easier though, and probably faster.

I would reccomend keeping regular backups regardless, once you have a complete backup of the system on the other computer, it's still a good idea to make and keep backups - your Exabyte drive should be fine for that.

-Ian