jw schultz wrote:
On Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 01:14:37PM +0200, chris at chrisburkert.de wrote:
Hi,
I have a project where I have to backup (copy /dev/hda on a server) and recover (copy back) hardrives from the clients. I tried this with rsync using:
BACKUP: rsync /dev/hda [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/path/to/image RECOVER: rsync [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/path/to/image /dev/hda
There is a problem when accessing devices like /dev/hda. The transfer aborts after a few seconds with the error message:
write failed on /dev/hda: Success unexpected EOF in read timeout
Any suggestions?
Also I want to save those images zipped at the server. Is this possible? I thought of using a pipe or a fifo. Can the algorithm of rsync work correctly then?
Rsync sees /dev/hda as a device special file in the /dev directory. Rsync cannot operate on block devices. Device nodes are a little like symlinks in that a decision must be made whether to operate on the the device (follow the link) or simply copy the node.
Rsync also does not support having the source and destination not be bit-for-bit the same, including size so you cannot sync an uncompressed file with a compressed one.
It may be there is another utility that can do what you wish. Perhaps pysync could be tweaked (significant tweak) to do it. To do it with rsync you would need to copy the device into a file prior to sycing, perhaps using bzip2 on it.
If you can get by with non-incremental, try g4u or partimage: http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ http://www.partimage.org/ Knoppix is a good way to do this off line.
I used g4u successfully to resize a notebook disk with bad blocks: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=5704707
g4u will zip the archive by default but you need to zero the
unallocated space for it to be really effective.
Jim
-- To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/rsync Before posting, read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
