dd problem

[Johnneylee Rollins]

<snip>
>        I never tried that script. I will need to do so. But bet you
> a can of cheap beer it doesn't work. To get the job done I had
> to use:
>
>        sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sdg1
>
> and that worked fine. But it fouled up my portable hard drive.
> I hope I can delete the dam windows files and save my backup
> of this computer!!!
<snip>

All of this for a simple backup procedure. As long as you don't
absolutely need a byte for byte copy of your system, and are more
concerned with files and permissions and timestamps, why can't you
simply tar it up and compress it, and then add a command to cron to do
a backup that only adds new files? Maybe even removes old ones? Or you
could do it like a snapshot with three or four backups, all compressed
and labeled by date. It's really not hard to do, and the chances of
things fouling up are minimal. The most important part of the command
would be to exclude the proper folders.

No low level copying, no need to worry about it overwriting anything
but that single backup or set of backups. Is there a reason why you
want to use dd (Nicknamed D*mned Dangerous) to back things up? You can
untar the backup into any filesystem type. DD can only write each byte
as it was.

My idea would be for you to look into a tar and compress method for
your backups, and not dd.

~SpaceGhost