[buug] dd to clone

[Michael Paoli]

Quoting John de la Garza <john at jjdev.com>:
> I have a linux box that is up and running in a production environment.
>  I want to reproduce the box for a backup server.  If I want to use dd
> to copy the harddrive could I simply do something like:
>  dd if=/dev/hda bs=1024k  of=/dev/hdb
> or must I know more about the hard drives and do some calculations for
> how much data to copy?
> hdb is greater than or equal to the size of hda in this case

I've written a fair bit around this general topic area.  One might want to
peek at., e.g. these USENET articles for at least a bit of an overview
of some of the considerations and methods:
news:1137906739.932912.234000 at g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
news:1147144043.547872.221020 at j73g2000cwa.googlegroups.com