[buug] disk clone

[Rob Helmer]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 05:51:17PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting f.johan.beisser (jan at caustic.org):
> 
> > use dump and restore, that's about the only way to do it in any UNIX OS,
> > short of reinstalling.
> 
> rsync is pretty comprehensive, too.  But he might try one of the tools
> that copy entire filesystems without getting knee-deep in their
> semantics, such as Partimage.  


Partimage looks pretty nice. 


> 
> > you may want to consider using tar, but that won't preserve device files
> > (i believe..). 
> 
> Confirmed.


With GNU tar adding the "-f" option will let you do this. 

The tar that comes with Solaris seems to store the permissions
correctly ( character, block, etc. ) with this option, but doesn't 
seem to store the major/minor numbers correctly.

I've used this to move filesystems around before. I've never used
Solaris x86, I'd be interested to know if this doesn't work there.

I just tested on the two systems I have access to, successfully 
archived "/dev/zero" on my Debian GNU/Linux and Solaris 7/Sparc machines
( well, on Sol7 it's a symlink to /devices/pseudo/mm at 0:zero, which
works too ) with GNU tar.



--
Rob Helmer