Automatic Clone of Ubuntu systems

[Michael R. Head]

On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 15:40 +0100, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Michael R. Head wrote:
> >>>I just use dd with a live CD. 
> >>
> >>Please see my other email with the drawbacks of dd.
> > 
> > gparted should allow you to grow the partition as necessary after the
> > image is written. Of course, there's no way with the dd method to write
> > to a drive that's smaller than the original drive.
> 
> Or even one that is larger and has a different geometry.

Right. Good point. At my place, all the machines are effectively
identical.

> 
> > Of course, all the systems that I'm duping to are identical.
> 
> Doesn't dd waste a lot of time copying all the 0 bits at the end?

Yes and no. Certainly, it reads/writes every bit on the disk, but if the
bits are passed through a compressor like zcat before being stored, it's
not too bad. Restoring the image is fairly quick (with a 3G compressed
image to an 80G drive over a 10mbit network from an XP file server, it
takes about 45 minutes to restore the whole thing). The bottleneck here
is the network because there are some old hubs under the floorboards.

> 
> -- 
>       /\/`) http://opendocumentfellowship.org
>      /\/_/
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> 
-- 
Michael R. Head <burner at suppressingfire.org>
GPG: http://www.suppressingfire.org/~burner/gpg.key.txt [0x4C9DA1D0]
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