Brian's How To

I wanted a way to create a backup of my whole hard drive or just a partition of the drive.  In windows I use Ghost or Acronis but for Linux I wanted something free and easy to use.  DD is build into Linux and works great.  I like that it is possible to compress the image with gzip.  Here is how to do backups with DD.

Compressed Backup

dd if=/dev/hdx | gzip > /path/to/image.gz

Change hdx for the hard drive to backup.

Restore Backup of hard disk copy

dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

gzip -dc /path/to/image.gz | dd of=/dev/hdx

MBR backup

Backup MBR and partition table.

dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image count=1 bs=512

MBR restore

dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

Add “count=1 bs=446″ to exclude the partition table from being written to the disk

I am Brian McCammon.  I have been doing a lot of work with computers as it is my job and hobby.  I have in the pas year or so started in on Linux.  I have learned a lot in that time and thought that it would be nice to have a single place that I could go and find a lot of how tos for things.

Currently at work I am a system admin which means I get to play with a lot of big servers.  Currently I get to play with VMware and Windows Server 2003 servers but I am testing going to VMware vShpere and Windows Server 2008 x64.

As for home I have built a Linux firewall from scratch, not a pre built distro, and have moved on to doing virtual machines using the FOSS project KVM.  I am in the process of getting funds to build an iSCSI SAN and another VM server so I can do live migration of VMs.

If you guys have things that you would like to know I would be glad to try and help or if I have done it I will try to get all my How To documents posted.  The main thing I have to do now is get to organizing them so they are useable for everyone.

Thanks for checking and check back soon and often for the latest How Tos

Brian McCammon