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On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, David Richardson wrote: > I was thinking about just using dd to copy the entire hard drive on > the currently working machine to a file and then if I ever need to put > in a new drive just using dd to write the contents of the old drive > onto the new drive. Is it a problem if the new drive is a different > size than the old? Or does anyone have a suggest of a better way? I have a feeling this will be a long answer, and it might be a little more manual than you like. It also may be a little overkill, but here is what I am doing now. It could be done better, but I am making do with the hardware I have available. My primary workstation is also my backup server. It has a 3ware raid controller with three 160 gig drives attached. Two of those drives are mirrored, and are 3 year warrantee Western Digital drives. The third is just an independant drive. It is a Maxtor 1 year warrantee drive that I already had to RMA, and had a bunch of trouble with the original drive. The mirror is where my os and home directories reside, the independant drive is my scratch space and backup area. I use the backup drive to store backups for the local workstation, my laptop, and two remote desktops at different locations. I have been using a very nice piece of software, rdiff-backup: http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/ It is very bandwidth and storage efficient. The website does a better job explaining what it does than I will, so I won't try :). I run rdiff-backup against my local machine and laptop once per day (the laptop only gets hit when it happens to be connected at the right time, or I manually run it once in a while). The remove machines (connected by cable modem) are backed up either once per week, or once per month (depending on machine). There are a lot of ways you can do this, but I break the rdiff backup jobs into one job for the home filesystem, one job for everything else (my laptop also has a seperate job for backing up my Wine C: drive). I exclude a lot of log files, and most of my mp3s and video files to keep the backup size manageable. So far, this isn't much of a disaster recovery plan... So, once a month I have a script that runs cpio against the rdiff directories that excludes the increments. I use bzip2 with the highest compression available as well (time doesn't matter to me, and I nice the heck out of the jobs). I have a 10 pack of dvd+rw discs that I use to rotate backups. My laptop and desktop combined take up 3 discs, and the 2 remote machines fit on one. I keep two months of cpio backups on dvd+rw at any given time. Every three months or so (depending on how important I feel the changes to my disks are), I burn regular dvd+r backups and store them offsite. I used to burn weekly differentials as well, but I was always too busy to keep it up. This gives me 30 or so days of "Oops! I deleted a file!" on the cheap 160 gig. I'm never more than one month behind if all 3 drives died at the same time. In the event of a fire, I won't be more than 3 months behind. Three months is fine, because I keep my revision control repositories on my webhost and keychain as well :). For recovery, I have a small custom Morphix boot cd (about 180 meg) that I append to the dvd discs. So I just boot off the dvd, partition the new drive, un-cpio the archives, run lilo on the new drive, and I am back up and running. I have tested a restore in VMWare, and it worked like a charm. I just changed the drive X was using, and it came right up. I'm very impressed with the speed of rdiff-backup over the internet. I did both initial backups locally to my laptop, and moved them to my desktop. Now they probably take 1-2 hours on average to backup each week/month. I'd be happy to share my (rather shoddy) scripts with anyone who wants them. I hope this was helpful, Pat ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug