Re: [PLUG] Cloning a dying hard drive

["Keith C. Perry" <kperry@daotechnologies.com>]

I used to use a dd imaging method but its not the best way to move a filesystem for several reasons:

1) on journaling fs', the journal may not be written to disk after shutdown.  This can cause imagine integrity issues which may render the image useless.
2) images will be the size of the drive not the filesystem so if you have a lot of free space its a waste of resources.
3) images may also fail is there is problem reading a bad location those dd conv parameters can help prevent failures but it doesn't always work and even when it does resulting image may be unusable.

So, when moving a filesystem, I use xfsdump/xfsrestore for xfs and cpio for ext4 or anything else.

---
KP-

On Jul 18, 2015 20:23, Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com> wrote:
>
> The hard drive on my home server is starting to give me errors.  I 
> actually got a kernel panic today while I was out because of it.  I 
> fsck'ed it and it seems OK for now, but that's what I thought when I 
> fsck'ed it a few days ago when I saw errors, too... 
>
> The machine is old and needs to be upgraded, but I'm going to need a 
> few days to order the parts.  As a stopgap I just stopped by 
> Microcenter and picked up a 1 TB HD in hopes of copying everything off 
> the old 1 TB drive before things get any worse. 
>
> I've done this process at least once before, it was probably like 10 
> years ago.  Does anyone have any thoughts on the instructions here? 
>
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Disk_cloning#Cloning_an_entire_hard_disk 
>
> That certainly seems the simplest method, assuming the errors remain 
> manageable.  Other methods that might work would be 
>
> * rsync from the roots of the old partitions to the new ones 
> * full restore from my backups 
>
> Thanks in advance for any advice. 
>
> Walt
>
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