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Old 06-25-2012, 02:35 PM   #16
scandalist
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jefro View Post
"I don't want to brick my data by using unsafe methods."

EDDY1 posted an alternative to using a file based copy. As with dd and almost every other program there are many issues.
And This would be my go to method under most circumstances. Every once in a while though I run into clients who want to upgrade their hard drive but do not wish to re install because they lost their installation media for program "X" or "Y". Not much you can do in these situations except clone the drive.

I lost all the data of a past client trying to clone with Drive Image XML and the situation has really scared the shit out of me since. Worst feeling ever in the context of business. Ive had success before using clonezilla and other image utilities but I just don't trust anything to do a direct clone properly.

So ideally the best thing to do is backup data with a standard file copy and then clone the drive. Even though cloning seems to be haphazard at best, I'd still be interested to know what you guys think is the safest method. In my experience, Clonezilla has proved to be fairly efficient although occasionally I've ran into snags with hardware detection.
 
Old 06-25-2012, 02:42 PM   #17
EDDY1
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It creates an exact copy of the drive, all you would have to do is switch the drives after the cloning process.
Quote:
In my experience, Clonezilla has proved to be fairly efficient although occasionally I've ran into snags with hardware detection.
If you are cloning to a usb enclosure it tells you to wait 5 seconds for it to find it.

Last edited by EDDY1; 06-25-2012 at 02:45 PM.
 
Old 06-25-2012, 04:28 PM   #18
descendant_command
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Quote:
Originally Posted by scandalist View Post
I lost all the data of a past client trying to clone with Drive Image XML and the situation has really scared the shit out of me since. Worst feeling ever in the context of business.
So the moral of the story is to VERIFY your copy BEFORE you delete the original ...
 
Old 06-25-2012, 05:52 PM   #19
jefro
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The old way was to make a backup overnight and then apply it back before the start of the day. It was a very scary way to test backups but 10's of thousands of admins did it every night.
 
Old 06-25-2012, 09:06 PM   #20
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My attitude is that if the data is readable by a filesystem aware tool (note that excludes dd) you are probably pretty safe.
Some (so called) "imaging tools" have these smarts built in for you - partclone, partimage, ntfsclone (all used by clonezilla) for example. Clonezilla will only use dd as a last resort.

When I need a verifiable backup I use something like fsarchiver. Nothing is as important as your data. The rest can be rebuilt easily.
 
  


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