On 9/14/10 7:54 AM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
John R Pierce wrote:
Is there a document with instructions for this? I've had smartd warnings that a hard disk in my server is sick, so I am installing a new drive (in addition to the old).
I generally use dump ... | restore ... to clone a complete e2fs/e3fs volume. it copies everything exactly on an inode by inode basis.
Thanks for the suggestion. Could you give a concrete command for copying / to say a new filesystem on /mnt/hd ?
(I'm wondering how this approach deals with symbolic links, /dev , /proc , etc
If you want an exact copy and are going to the same sized drive or larger, one of the handiest ways is to boot a clonezilla-live cd and let it do a disk-disk copy. It knows enough about most file systems to only copy the used disk blocks but otherwise it is an exact image copy.
Otherwise, 'rsync --one-file-system -aH source target' will work and will pick up where it left off it you stop and restart. I usually cd into the source directory and use '.' as the source to avoid having to remember whether the directory name will be created on the target or not. /dev and /proc are mount points best skipped with the --one-file-system option.