backing up with dd fails

[Alan]

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 07:02:51 -0700
Kevin Kempter <kevin at kevinkempterllc.com> wrote:

> Hi list;
> 
> I've recently returned to Fedora from SuSE. With SuSE I would always backup my 
> main laptop hard drive to a second drive via dd as follows:
> 1) boot into single user mode (init 1)
> 2) run dd if=/dev/SRC of=/dev/TARGET conv=noerror,sync bs=4k    #where SRC = 
> my current OS drive and TARGET = the backup drive

noerror,sync is going to be very slow (especially as several problems
where sync didn't always do the right thing were fixed as the kernels move
on in version).

You shouldn't need to use "sync" except in very special cases, similarly
a larger block size will help if you must use sync and a little anyway.

Alan