Hello,

I need to do a full backup of my 250GB /dev/hdb. The target drive is a brand new 300GB external drive (/dev/hdd).

- Do I need to format the new drive in some particular fashion before I can backup data to it?

- Do I need to match the partition table of the source drive or anything, or will one standard Linux partition of 300GB be sufficient?

- What exactly does dump store on the target drive? Is it just a single massive file you pick apart using restore, or does it just copy the directory structure and files as they are?

Thanks

The most efficient way to do this is to tar and compress whole directories into single files which you simply copy to the new drive.

eg:
tar -czvf archivename directoryname
creates a .tar.gz compressed archive with the contents of directoryname.

On the new drive, first create one or more partitions using fdisk or cfdisk, then create the filesystem using mkfs

(If you were referring to a command called "dump", I know nothing of that)

If you just want to back up the drive, format it with the same filesystem as the source and use rsync to synchronize them. With rsync, updates will complete much faster than with tar, as it only transfers the changes.

Matir is right (I assume). I've not yet learned rsync, and tend to do things manually.

Does rsync do compression?

Could also try using cp -auv once you have partitioned the new drive and use that to transfer over your important information.
Or "dd" to do it all.

rsync can do compression. That the -z option. But that's only compression when in-transfer, so it's only really useful to a remote machine (oh yes, rsync works over ssh as well ). The idea is that the two disks will be identical at the end.

rsync is definitely a plausible solution, but here is another question:

/dev/hdb consists of several partitions: /hdb1, /hdb2, /hdb3, /hdb5, and /hdb6. In order to use rsync in this manner, do I have to create partitions of identical size on my external drive?

No, rsync operates at the file-system level. I backup my /home and several other partitions to the same filesystem on an external drive on my computer.

I'll give that a shot, thanks!

you could just clone it with the dd command