Dear all,

i gotta create backup of an existing system.

on my R&D i got this,

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

but what if i don't have another hard disk to take replica of an existing system.
So anyone please share me advise "how can i create image of an existing running linux server"

thanks in Advance

OK, so you don't have another harddisk.
So what do you have access to?
DVDROM or CDROM? External drive? NFS share? SSH access on another system?

Thanks for your quick reply,

i have the whole server with me, having complete packages installed into it.
Now the scenario is, i want to make the complete image of current running server.
So that i can have the backup for future and the system will become portable too.

OK, so what backup medium do you have? DVDROM or CDROM? External drive? NFS share? SSH access on another system?

that will be SSH access on another system sir!!

OK. What you could do is pipe the output of the 'dd' command through ssh and save it to a file on the remote machine:
There's a couple of things to be said:
- the remote system should have enough free space,
- if the network, the local or remote machine are slow this may be a lengthy process,
- the process should not be interrupted,
- if you first zero free space and then compress it with say bzip2 or xz this may be quicker,
- 'dd' arguments like "conv=noerror,sync bs=4M" may help speed up copying as well,
- creating a hash of /dev/sda (to check proper transfer) won't match the remote files hash unless you boot another OS or Live CD/DVD.

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