Down and dirty dump

[Rick Stevens]

Scott Mertens wrote:
> I have a need to move my RHEL4 computer across the country.  I am
> driving with it, and currently I have not set up a backup process. I
> would like to maybe do a dump just as a precaution.  I have two 200 GIG
> HD's on the system, the second one is not in use at the moment, but I
> can mount it no problem.
> 
> Can someone give me a command line to dump one drive to another? Assume
> the first drive is SDA, and the second one to dump to is SDB?  I guess
> the other question is does the LV on SDA get copied as well?

If you use "dd if=/dev/sdax of=/dev/sdbx" and make sure that the target
partition is the same size or larger than the source partition, you
should be OK.  You should make hard copies of the "lvdisplay" output,
just in case you need to recover it.

> I know there is a man page on dump, but I must not be typing the command
> correctly, so once I have the command to type, I can re-look up the man
> pages and see what it all means.

Dump is really intended to do a low-level dump of the filesystem to
tape.  It's cryptic and I don't recommend you do it.

If you have a CD-R or DVD-R, you may want to think about tarring up the
filesystems, splitting the resulting tar files into CD- or DVD-sized
chunks and burning them to CD or DVD...just for some added protection.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-         "If you can't fix it...duct tape it!"  - Tim Allen         -
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