cloning drive

[Andrew Jarrett]

On 7/6/07, D. Michael McIntyre <michael.mcintyre at rosegardenmusic.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 05 July 2007, Tim M wrote:
>
> > using -R do just what you were writing about in your last paragraph? I see
> > I need to learn a LOT MORE! Thanks for the link and the interesting
> > discussion.
>
> -a includes -R, and if you try a simple copy it will recurse.  I can't
> remember exactly how I handled this last time.  I guess what I probably did
> was copy the directories in / one by one, omitting /mnt entirely (or wherever
> I had my new hard drive mounted up temporarily.)
>
> That seems right.
>
> bin/   cdrom@  etc/   initrd/      initrd.img.old@  lost+found/  mnt/  proc/
> sbin/  sys/  usr/  vmlinuz@
> boot/  dev/    home/  initrd.img@  lib/             media/       opt/  root/
> srv/   tmp/  var/  vmlinuz.old@
>
> mount -t ext3 /dev/hd_foo1 /mnt/new/root
> mount -t ext3 /dev/hd_foo2 /mnt/new/var
> mount -t ext3 /dev/hd_foo3 /mnt/new_root/home
> for f in bin etc intrd sbin sys usr boot dev home lib media opt root srv tmp
> var do;cp -a blah foo;done
>
> Or something.
>
> I seem to recall just creating an empty /mnt and /media and /proc
> under /mnt/new_root, and going directory by directory in order to avoid the
> recursion issue.
>
> Or something.  I've still only managed to waste 54% of my current 300 GB, so I
> haven't had to do this in a couple three years.
>
> Another thing to play with is rsync.  There's some way to tell rsync to avoid
> recursion, but I'm way too tired to look at the man page at the moment.
> --
> D. Michael McIntyre

Wouldn't it be easier to just unmount all the extra drives that you
don't want to clone, do a copy (-a or whatever) to a destination *not*
on another drive (maybe copy it to a new folder "/backup_data" or
"/image") and *then* remount your backup drive and copy that
"backup_data" folder to the external media?  This way you don't need
to worry about recursion at all.

<slightly offtopic>
This will definately fulfill the "imaging" or "cloning" aspect of
Norton Ghost, but does anyone know of a program that will push an
image out to other computers (like a full lab of 30 computers).  I
have heard of g4u, but I am not sure if it does this.  I don't think
that Tim was looking for this type of functionality, but I was just
curious.
</slightly offtopic>

Andrew

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