Re: [PLUG] Backing up a HD using dd

[LeRoy Cressy <ldc@lrcressy.com>]

cms wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Back to the technical help stuff...
>
> I have a--very nice--Toshiba laptop that I dual-boot WinXP and SuSE 9.1. I'm
> trying to backup the Linux partitions (five of them) from the machine's HD to
> an external firewire HD using dd so I can reinstall WinXP. Like many people, I
> still have occasion to use WinXP for work and school <sigh> and I only have
> the install CDs provided by Toshiba; in other words, I do not have an actual
> WinXP CD. This process would be very easy if I were able to use Knoppix with
> this machine, however, Knoppix will not run well enough to copy the five
> partitions. Knoppix boots well enough but doesn't handle acpi/apm correctly so
> the machine heats up during the copy process and eventually just crashes. I
> have some other bootable CDs that I could use but I'm stuck on mount issues.
> For example, I tried the F.I.R.E. CD (http://fire.dmzs.com/) and although its
> dated, the CD booted nicely and ran well without acpi/apm issues. Trouble is,
> it does not use ramdisk like Knoppix does so I'm not able to mount an external
> device to copy my data to, an external device such as a firewire HD.
>
> Is there another way to copy the data--as in dd--from the five partitions? I
> wanted to use dd to copy the partitions to external media. Is there another
> way to mount external media using a bootable CD so I can copy data to it?
> Any suggestions?

I think that you want to do a raw copy of a partition like

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mountpoint/hda1.bin bs=1M

You can use tar to do your backups which I do to cd-r cd's.  For 
sesitive data like /home and /var I encrypt the data using gpg.

Attached is my personal backup script.  One thing to note, for ~/.gnupg 
I maintain a floppy backup with an encrypted file system with revocation 
certificuts and etc.  You need the ~/.gnupg/secring.gpg along with all 
of the other files on this floppy.  Creating an encrypted filesystem on 
a floppy is not too hard.

# You need a kernel with loopcrypt and the crypto stuff in it like 2.6.*
shread /dev/fd0
# Choice of encryption is up to you, I happen to like twofish which is
# totally open.  You can use aes if you want to.
losetup -e twofish /dev/loop[0-7] /dev/fd0
# Use a nice long passphrase >= 20 characters when prompted
# Use the same loopp device as you used with losetup
mke2fs -c -m 1 -i 1024 -b 1024 -j -v /dev/loop[0-7]
mount /dev/loop[0-7] /floppy

For more info on encrypted file systems see 
http://linuxfromscratch.org/~devine/erfs-howto.html

To unmount the encrypted file system:
umount /floppy
losetup -d /dev/loop[0-7]




> As always, I value this list tremendously, despite some of the arguments:/
>
> TIA for all suggestions.
>
> Chris/CMS
> ___________________________________________________________________________
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--
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Attachment: backup.sh
Description: Bourne shell script

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature