How to copy a Fedora system?

Kenneth Porter shiva at sewingwitch.com
Sat Apr 15 02:59:28 UTC 2006


On Friday, April 14, 2006 6:12 PM +0100 Timothy Murphy 
<tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:

>>> cd /mnt/newdisk
>>> dump 0f /dev/sda1 | restore xf -
>>
>> Thanks.
>> This sounds plausible - I'll see if it works.
>
> On thinking about it, should it not be
>
> cd /mnt/newdisk
> dump 0f - | restore rf -
>
> ?
> Better be sure before I start ...

Oops, you're almost right. dump needs to know which partition to back up, 
and what file to store the backup in. The "f -" says to send the backup to 
stdout (ie. the pipe) but you also need to specify the partition to back 
up. Recall that dump backs up the raw device for the partition, not the 
mount point. That's why it can back up stuff you normally couldn't see due 
to other mount points. It can also maintain sparse files sparsely. (I think 
tar is now able to do this.) restore, OTOH, restores the backup to a 
mounted filesystem, not a raw device. (This asymmetry means that a member 
of the disk group can perform a backup, but you need to be root to perform 
a verify.)

So I think the correct command is:

cd /mnt/newdisk
dump 0f - /dev/sda1 | restore rf -

And before someone reminds us about Linus saying that dump shouldn't be 
used, I'll mention the deprecation FAQ on the dump home page:

http://dump.sf.net/




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