dd if=hda1 of=whatever ???????

[Matt Graham]

From: "mike havens" <bmike1 at gmail.com>
> dd if=hda1 bs=<?> of=windows<date> bs=<?>
> what about the byte size thing? How should I figure that out; or do I
> need to worry about it?

Yeah.  32k is good for modern disks.  It defaults to 512 bytes, which is
just way too small--64 read()s and 64 write()s of 512 bytes take a lot
more time than 1 read() and 1 write() of 32K.  Just one bs= as well.
If you need different block sizes for in and out, that's obs= and ibs=.

> I was planning on copying to a cd but I think it would be a neat thing
> to copy different images to the same disk. I looked for but had
> problems  finding the compression option. Would you explain it to me?

dd is an old-school utility and as such, it doesn't *HAVE* a compression
option.  Pipe it through gzip if you want compression.

But if you want to back up a partition or set of partitions, dd is
probably the wrong tool.  If you're using any Linux filesystem, FAT,
or NTFS, you'd be better off with partimage.  partimage can find out
which blocks on the filesystem are in use, and only copy those
blocks, which makes it faster and makes its backups smaller.  

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see