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Need clarification on backup to a HD

Firstly, thanks for an amazing site and faq.

I've got a spanking brand new 14hr and an equally new Maxtor 60gb. I want to back up my virgin drive to the C drive on my computer - it's a a 30 GB drive, with plenty of space left. It's the main drive for my computer, with all my programs on it. I've read the FAQ multiple times, and gone back into the archives but...stupid obvious question alert...

If I use Dylan's boot disk to backup to a single compressed file on my computer's C drive, will it wipe the rest of the drive? Or will it just install the backed up Tivo A drive onto a sub-directory or some sort of partition? I'm assuming the latter is the case, but want 100% confirmation to avoid a major "oh s***" moment later. Thanks much.

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Lets say you have your C: drive as Primary Master. That makes it hda under Linux. And if you make your Tivo drive Secondary Master, that makes it hdc under Linux.

You will be backing up with the dd command. If you write to /dev/hda, you are doing a raw disk write and it will kill your drive. Don't do it.

Instead, you need to mount the drive, and then write to it. use:
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt
to mount the first partition of hda (assuming it is a fat32 partition.)

Now you can do the following commands to see your drive directory.
cd /mnt
ls (or ls -l)

Now, for this next step you shouldn't trust me. I'm just learning Linux. So don't do this until someone else says it look right. But I would use this command to back up:

dd if=/dev/hdc bs=8192 | gzip -9c | split -b 600m - /mnt/tivo.gz

This command says to back up the entire hdc drive (which will catch all 11 partitions). It uses a block size of 8192 (instead of the default 512) for speed. It pipes the bytes to gzip, using level 9 compression. Those bytes are piped to split, which should write out a bunch of 600Mb files named tivoaa.gz, tivoab.gz, etc. These files can be written to CDR. More important, this should avoid the 2Gb file size limit.

OK everybody, how did I do?

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: Henderson, NV
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Not bad. But I'd change the size of your split command to 650m since that gets an extra 50 Megs on each CD. Using 650m and putting the files on a Joliet format 74 minute CD-R with Adaptec Easy-CD Creator 4.0 told me I had 48k left on the CD. So it's just under the limit.

I'd also add a _ to the end of the tivo.gz filename, so it was a little more obvious that the resulting chunks were gzip chunks. For example, your version would give files named tivo.gzaa, tivo.gzab, etc. What I'm talking about would end up with tivo.gz_aa, tivo.gz_ab, etc. Just a little clearer, in my mind.

I also wouldn't bother with the -9c on the gzip command, since it's not going to get much more compression than the default, and it will end up taking two or three times as long. Unless he's using a bleeding-edge CPU, then it might be able to beat the hard drive, but I doubt it. Instead, just use -c (drop the 9) and it'll go much faster.

So to reiterate, everything you said would work fine (I'm pretty sure) but the options could be improved.


------------------
Dan T.
RKBA!

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