'dd' command can be really handy when it comes to taking an Operating System backup to clone the disk the OS is installed on. Here are few examples of using dd command for taking OS backup.
Jan 02, 2020 Image backup/Imaging: Images are byte-for-byte snapshots of your entire hard drive (normally without the empty sectors) or partition, and can be used to restore both the operating system and data.
- Want to make an external hard drive backup? This guide will show you the steps for backing up external hard drive.
- Re: Best Way to Backup a Raid hard drive on Windows 7 Pro OS. RAID-1 is mirroring, so in a way you are always backing up your HDD, in real time.
1. Backup Entire Hard disk To another DISK
1. In Below example we want to clone disk 'sda' and have an identical disk on the server as 'sdb'.
2. To backup an entire copy of a hard disk to another hard disk connected to the same system, execute the dd command. The UNIX device name of the source hard drive is /dev/sda, and device name of the target hard disk is /dev/sdb, sync option allows to copy everything using synchronized I/O.
Here,
if: source disk drive (/dev/sda)
of: destination disk drive (/dev/sdb)
bs: read and write BYTES at a time (default is 512 Bytes, You can use bs=64k for bigger disks)
noerror: continue after read errors.
sync: use synchronized I/O for data, also for metadata
3. If want To restore data to original disk you need to repeat the previous step with the correct source(sdb) and destination(sda). You can even remove sda and boot from sdb in this case.
Backup Os On Flash Drive
2. Backup Entire Hard disk To disk image
1. You can create an image file of the hard disk and save it in other storage devices. There are many advantages to backing up your data to a disk image, one being the ease of use. This method is typically faster than other types of backups, enabling you to quickly restore data following an unexpected catastrophe. Use the command below to backup the hard disk /dev/sda to a disk image file.
Here,
if: source disk drive (/dev/sda)
of: destination disk drive (/dev/sdb)
2. To restore a hard disk with the image file of an another hard disk, use the following dd command example.
Here,
if: source disk drive (/dev/sda)
of: destination disk drive (/dev/sdb)
3. Backup Entire Hard disk To disk image on NFS and restoring it
1. Check if there is enough space on nfs server available.
2. Create the image. Make sure you have enough bandwidth available.
Here,
if: source disk drive (/dev/sda)
of: destination disk drive (/dev/sdb)
3. To restore from the backup disk image on nfs (such as if there is a disk failure on disk sda and the system can't boot), boot into rescue mode with networking.
4. Mount the nfs share. Let's say newly created directory /nfsshare.
5. Restore sda using disk image backup.
Backup Os Drive On Virtualbox
Here,
if: source disk drive (/dev/sda)
of: destination disk drive (/dev/sdb)
Backup Os Drive On Macbook Pro
6. Reboot the server.
