Creating and restoring image backups

[Fred Roller]

J Bickhard wrote:
> Is this method fast?
>
> Jake (dats me)
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 1:34 PM, Dan Farrell <dan at spore.ath.cx> wrote:
>   
>> On Sat, 1 Aug 2009 12:01:37 -0500
>> J Bickhard <jbickhard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I have a computer running Windows XP home edition, and have been
>>> trying (rather unsucessfully) to create a full-image backup of the
>>> 80GB harddrive onto my USB seagate 350(?) GB external hard drive. My
>>> question is this: is there a way, with the Ubuntu boot disk, to make
>>> this backup without installing Ubuntu on the computer in question.
>>>       
>> The easiest way is to use dd.
>>
>> dd if=/dev/windows-disk of=/mnt/big-disk/windows-disk.img
>>
>> that should do it.  or
>>
>> dd if=/dev/windows-disk of=/mnt/big-disk/windows-disk.img &
>> while(killall -USR1 dd) do sleep 2; done;
>>
>> then switch back to dd's terminal, if you want to see your progress.
>>
>> You can put the image back the same way, except switch the if and of
>> artuments for dd.
>>
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>>     
>
>   
25 Mb/sec or 53.3 minutes [(80 Gb/25)/60]

This is the fastest through-put to a usb drive I have ever had and it 
can get as low as 10 Mb/sec increasing the time to 133.3 minutes (2.2 hrs)

Also, increase the block size to 4096, and this will help speed things up.

    dd if=/dev/sd[a-z] of=/media/disk/yourXPimage.img bs=4096

dd defaults to bs=512.

-- 
Fred
www.fwrgallery.com

"Life is like linux, simple.  If you are fighting it you are doing something wrong."