16 January, 2009

The Secrets of DD and using it to backup your HDDS



This is just a quick post to tell you all how to backup your HDD´s to a backup image, this works with either an entire HDD, a single partition or even things such as a DVD.

First the command to back up an entire drive to an image...

sudo dd if=/dev/sdX of=drivebackup.img bs=4096

if you want to back up a single partition you add the partition number to the device path so sdX would be sdX1. Remember to replace the X with your actual drive letter.

To restore the image you would use the following command:

dd if=drivebackup.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4096

If you want to compress the image that you create, which is very useful you use the following command:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdX bs=4096 | gzip > drivebackup.img.gz

this will the compress the file saving space.

To restore the image you can use this command:

gzip -dc drivebackup.img | dd of=/dev/sdX

again this can work with single partitions as well, or even a DVD/CD.

There is one other thing that can be of use which is splitting the images created, this means you can create a backup of a HDD and place it on DVD's :-)
to do this use the following command:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdX bs=4096 | gzip -c | split -b 4000m - drivebackup.img.gz

this will the compress the file saving space and split it into 4000 Meg files.

To restore the image you can use this command:

cat drivebackup.img.gz.* | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/sdX

I don't take any responsibility if you damage anything on your computer this is a tutorial and you use it at your own risk :-)

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NOTE: These articles are tutorials/general ramblings. I do not except responsibility for anything that goes wrong, be it a broken HDD, an entire computer or if you chop off your arms, follow anything I say on this site at your own risk.
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Comments

Name:James Little
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Got link from another site, worked great for backing up my data.

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Comment:
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:),

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Name:Butemeyer
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:),

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i love your work!,

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Good morning. Nice work.,

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Comment:
Have a great week and thanks!,

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Just stopping by to say Hello!,

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Comment:
your work is amazing.,

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Name:Tim Docks
URL:http://chottuweb.com
Comment:
great )

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Name:Medhurst
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Comment:
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Comment:
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Wut up?,

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Name:
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Name:Jim Stone
URL:http://chottuweb.com
Comment:
Great! ) thanks

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Name:Williams
URL:http://chottuweb.com
Comment:
Thank you!

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2009 - 2010