[CentOS] Mirroring Hard Drive

Sun Dec 7 21:29:36 UTC 2008
William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com>

On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 12:36 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
> Matt wrote:
> >>> I have a 500GB Sata drive about 15% used I would like to make an exact
> >>> copy of too another Sata 500GB drive as a spare.  That way if
> >>><snip>

> no, as dd is a raw block copy of the storage device.   i dont actually 
> recommend usinig DD on file systems at all
> 
> instead, assuming the raid is freshly formatted, and temporarily mounted 
> as /mnt I would use something like...
> 
>     dump 0vf - /dev/sda1 | (cd /mnt; restore -rf - )
> 
> if there's more than one file system on the source, repeat this for each 
> one.   note that the source file systems must be unmounted when you do 
> this, hence you would need to do this from a CD boot if its the system 
> drive.

I've always wondered why so many folks use the above construct when a
_fast_ less "expensive" solution STM to be something like

cd <your source mount point> ; find . <other params you desire> \
   | cpio -p<other params you want> /mnt

Am I missing something? Just old fashioned? Cpio has all the params you
want and can be _very_ fast with the righ parameters. Similar to the
above dump/restore set I've seen many use tar/untar equivalents.

Just curious is all.

> <snip sig stuff>

-- 
Bill