cloning drive

[Jeremy Anderson]

On Friday 06 July 2007 08:25:52 Andrew Jarrett wrote:
> 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
>
> --
> 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

I am going to repeat myself now.  Look at http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page 
for the functionality you desire.  You can save to a server and other things 
with partimage.  It is opensource and it works.