LinuxAnswers DiscussionThis forum is to discuss articles posted to LinuxAnswers.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
Is it safe to unmount the /var partition when the server is running? I normally schedule the copying in the middle of the night when there is no user accessing. It is only accessed by users in the same country.
No -- it would cause all sorts of grief. /var should only be unmounted in single user mode. Have you considered LVM snapshots?
/dev/sdb7 was not mounted when copying was done. The server was idle hence little writing activity when copying. Not a single file, not even the index.html file was copied, from the www directory. I even tried placing other files there, which was also not copied.
I have done this before on live servers, running Debian Etch, flawlessly. It is only now that I'm doing this on Deban Lenny. I don't know if this problem is OS related. Unfortunately, I don't have another machine to reproduce this.
I'm afraid my knowledge of /var is insufficient. I'm going to have to read up on it as I have rssnapshot of my LennyNAS OS partition on my to-do list (only just rssnapshotting my storage partition right now).
catkin, could you elaborate in regard to LVM snapshots or provide some links?
Now this is a very very nice guide to dd utility. Nice job!
Amazing, too, how so old a program proves to be of far more use, than are many of them modern GUI-based utilities. Really, I can see this problem in software development realm: developers create bunches of utilities with overlapping funcionality, while some very old ones are still of very much use.
For example, the almost universal usage of this dd utility, which is also very reliable in that you know 100% what the thing is doing for you, once you hit Enter...
So I find this guide to be very useful and educative. thanks to the author.
1. Is there a way to verify the integrity of a file created by dd? I would not want to find out there was a problem with a backup I made of my /home partition and find out that it was corrupted when I tried to restore it.
2. If I use conv=noerror won't that hide any error that might occur during the creation of the image and cause a problem when trying to restore the image?
3. Can you incrementally add to a previously created image file? It would be nice to be able to update a backup of my /home partition rather than making a whole new backup.
Thanks for a really good and complete tutorial on dd. The man page just doesn't do it for me.
This is the kind of public knowledge base we should build for all things Linux. Fast tracking noobs like me. This addresses the main issue with Linux, it's vast yet not difficult. It is; however; extremely time consuming to scratch for stuff on your own. Thanks, this is highly appreciated.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.