How to mirror a harddisk for backup purpose

[Gianluca Cecchi]

I would suggest these two tools that noone mentioned:

- parted      http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/parted.html
GNU Parted is a program for creating, destroying, resizing, checking and
copying partitions, and the file systems on them. This is useful for
creating space for new operating systems, reorganising disk usage, copying
data between hard disks and disk imaging.



      - partimage     http://www.partimage.org

      Partition Image is a Linux/UNIX utility which saves partitions in the
ext2fs/ext3fs (the linux standard), ReiserFS (a new journalized and powerful
file system) or FAT16/32 (DOS & Windows file systems) file system to an
image file. The image file can be compressed in the GZIP/BZIP2 formats to
save disk space, and split into multiple files to be copied on removable
floppies (ZIP for example), ...

      Partition Image will only copy data from the used portions of the
partition. For speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the
image file. This is unlike the 'dd' command, which also copies empty blocks.
Partition Image also works for large, very full partitions. For example, a
full 1 GB partition can be compressed with gzip down to 400MB.

      This  latest one seems to be very interesting: in the development
version there will be also the possibility to copy using network and SSL
encryption. They need testers to debug code!
      Beowulf community could be an optimal tester.

      Bye,
      Gianluca

----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert G. Brown" <rgb at phy.duke.edu>
To: "David Vos" <dvos12 at calvin.edu>
Cc: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2001 9:58 PM
Subject: Re: How to mirror a harddisk for backup purpose