Tar-ing an entire disk?

Completely Clueless · 04-15-2009, 04:50 PM

I'd like to tar an entire 8Gb solid state *disk* rather than just a partition on it, but all I have ever seen in examples on the net is it being used with files, folders and partitions. Is this do-able and if so, how??
Thanks,
CC.

wabbalee · 04-15-2009, 06:22 PM

what if you mount that disk in a folder, can you tar it then?

unSpawn · 04-15-2009, 06:49 PM

Tarring a disk doesn't make any sense to me but 'dd' can output to stdout which data 'tar' should happily accept on stdin.

jefro · 04-15-2009, 09:55 PM

Tar is tape archive from when we used tapes to backup systems.
It can put all files in order on some media to some other media that is in a single file with no space between.

Things like dd, cat and others can copy all data.

See tools already made like G4U.

maresmasb · 04-16-2009, 03:57 AM

Mount all the partitions that you need to backup somewhere on your system. Make sure that you exclude the one directory where want to save the new tar file. Maybe also exclude the /dev directory.

As already suggested, 'dd' might have some benefits for backing up the entire disk - as long as you intend to recover to the same hard disk, or one with a similar size.