On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 18:35, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday 13 May 2011 20:11:01 James Wall wrote:
>>
>> Another tool which will work well is dd.
>> as an example to back up my laptop before experimenting with new
>> distros, I do dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/backup/jalopy.img bs=2M to back
>> up the drive for a bare metal restore of the 40 GB hard drive.
>>
>
> Is the bs=2M important? Should one use the block size of the drive?
Speed improvement.
If you're doing a backup of a rather large disk, I duggest piping to
bzip2 or gzip. Unless the free space is random padding, even the
slightest
compression will be more efficient, space-wise, than the raw file. The
big problem is bzip2 -9, because you only get ~2.5 MB/s compression
speed.
