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On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 10:55:23PM -0700, Bryce C wrote:
> I'll second its usefulness here. I just dd'd an entire partition so I
> could back it up later with some compression. Wasn't fun though. 25Gb
> over 100Mbit ethernet to an NFS share was a bit slower that I might have
> liked. However, I know the data is identical because I did an md5 check

Couple of tips, which may or may not work for you:

Make use of the bs=3D option.  Set it equal to your drive's buffer size.
'dd if=3D/dev/hdXN of=3DhdXN.img bs=3D2M', for example (assuming a 2 meg
cache).

Before doing it, try filling up the free space with zeroes.  (Not
recommended for forensic purposes, of course.)  On the mounted
filesystem, 'dd if=3D/dev/zero of=3Dtrash bs=3D2M; rm trash'.  Then unmount
the filesystem.  Then compress the image on the fly: 'dd if=3D/dev/hdXN
bs=3D2M |gzip -9c > hdXN.img.gz'

I've got an image of a 20 gig partition that's only 2.5GB compressed,
and it's reasonably speedy to copy it back into place with a reasonable
block size.

If you run into a 2 gigabyte filesize limit, make use of stdin/stdout
redirection (assuming that you're using a recent enough kernel, which
you probably are).  For example, the first command above could be
rewritten as 'dd if=3D/dev/hdXN bs=3D2M >hdXN.img' if dd segfaults when you
hit 2 gigs.

--=20
Bill Jonas    *    bill@billjonas.com    *    http://www.billjonas.com/
"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your front door.  You step
into the Road,  and if you don't keep your feet,  there  is  no knowing
where you might be swept off to."  --  Bilbo Baggins

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