backing up a whole hard disk

[mgorse at mgorse.dhs.org (Mike Gorse)]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the replies, and I didn't know that there was a filesystem 
for Linux being developed that really supported writing to NTFS (last time 
I checked, the one in the kernel only supported it if you were writing to 
a file that already existed and weren't changing the size).

I tried using nfs, and the file that I was creating inexplicably stopped 
growing after I had transferred about 3gb of compressed data (neither 
machine showed any error), so I am following Nathan's suggestion and 
seeing if I have any better luck over ssh.

-- Michael Gorse / AIM:linvortex / http://mgorse.home.dhs.org --

On Wed, 11 May 2005 nmeyers at javalinux.net wrote:

> Not a bad idea, but it's best to do this when the disk is quiescent
> so the disk image will be in a clean state. I'd boot the laptop with a
> self-contained system like Knoppix, then do this copy.
>
> Also I've never had the best of luck with NFS - maybe it's improved since
> last I'd tried. I'd just push the image over to the desktop through
> some stream-oriented protocol. For example, if you're running ssh on
> your desktop, you could do this:
>
>  bzip2 </dev/hda | ssh -l <username> <desktop hostname> 'cat >/backup/ci-backup.bz2'
>
> Nathan