Mark Knecht wrote: > Hi, > Can anyone here think of a way to back up remote partitions before > installing Gentoo? Is there some way to run a command like dd but pipe > the output it back to my local machine? What other info might I need > to restore the remote machine later? I figure I'll save the partition > information from fdisk. Anything else? > > Thanks much, > Mark
when we did some backups of partitions from one computer to another (and then clone the partition to few other computers), we did it rougly in this way: first make the free space easily compressible, for example zero-ing it ( dd if=/dev/zero of=some_file_on_the_partition till it stops on 'disk full', then rm some_file_..., but there may be better ways) then on the second computer (were we wanted the backup): nc -l -p 7777 -q 0 | gunzip | pv >backupfile and on the first computer cat /dev/hda1 | pv | gzip | nc othermachine 7777 we were backuping the / partition, so we either booted from a cd, or just remounted / readonly pv is a small utility like cat, but prints nice statistics to stderr (speed,...) restoring would mean just doing it the other way around -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
