Back up Disks - clone hard disk

small tip - Back up Disks - clone hard disk

Posted: 12 Sep 2010 07:31 AM PDT

Clone a Hard disk before making changes to it is a great way to be sure you can go back to the previous state.
I usually do that before a major Linux upgrade on my servers, if something brokes during the update I can easily go back.
And the command is as easy as:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
Where if is the input media and of is the output media, be sure to avoid mistakes, as you can ruin your hard disk.
Backup to an image
If you prefer you can also save to an image, instead of using a whole disk as the target.
dd if=/dev/sda of=~/backup-disk-YY-MM-DD.img
If you want to store it on a CD or DVD, just follow this way.
First compress it
gzip ~/backup-disk-YY-MM-DD.img
Burn the image on the CD/DVD
cdrecord -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 name_of_iso_file.iso
You may want to check this out Burn ISO images
Restore backups
To restore the images, just exchange the if and of targets.
Example:

dd if=~/backup-disk-YY-MM-DD.img of=/dev/sda
Note:
Be sure to, not mess with
/dev/sda, /dev/hda, /dev/sda1.. etc... you can check the mounted points using the command df. It may have an output like this:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3             74786624  57024748  13962908  81% /
/dev/hda1               101086     36808     59059  39% /boot
none                    513256         0    513256   0% /dev/shm

Or maybe like this:

/dev/disk/by-uuid/fc8f5296-7bd8-463a-87af-87c6d2215ff9
                      42034200  15579204  24319972  40% /

If this happens, and /etc/fstab is by UUID check this Linux UUID