[Suns-at-Home] SunOs - Disk clone

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus@yahoo.com>
" 
" --- 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.

there's a big limitation to dd though - it doesn't image the
-filesystem-, it images the -disk-, so when you come to restore it
whatever you put the image onto is gonna look like a sun0424
afterward.  it better not be smaller, though there's not much risk of
that these days.

" 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.

it's just called dump; it wasn't renamed until solaris 2 when other
types of fs were supported.

dump isn't as fast as dd but it is the fastest of all the tools that
work within the fs.  you can dump to a file as well as a device, and
if you have rsh/rlogin/rexec perms set up you can dump to host:device
and even user@host:device.  i've never tried host:file but wouldn't be
surprised if that works too.

to restore you have to newfs the target first, but its geometry doesn't
have to match your source partition.  it doesn't even have to be as big
as long as it's -big-enough- to hold the files.

i've also copied fs to fs by dump | restore and even dump | rsh host
"cd targ && restore".  use option 'f -' for stdin/stdout.

favorite option to dump: 0
favorite options to restore: ry and v

" 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.

hear hear!
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh@an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought