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Old 11th August 2008
milo974 milo974 is offline
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Unhappy backup drive to image file

Hello, i want to backup drive ( there's openbsd 4.3 with postfix config, mails) to an image file one time a week. I ve mounted my nt share in : /nt_1
i want to backup the image to /nt_1/backupOpenBSD.img

How can i do that as simply as possible ? using dump ? dd ? cp ?

Last edited by milo974; 11th August 2008 at 06:54 AM. Reason: more precision
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Old 11th August 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by milo974 View Post
How can i do that as simply as possible ?
dump(8) & restore(8) are your safest bets. You should also look at recommendations in Section 14.9 as well:

http://openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#Backup
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Old 11th August 2008
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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If you want to back up an "image" of the complete physical drive as a single entity, then dd(1) of the "c" partition is needed. This will back up every block on disk, used or unused.

If you want to back up individual FFS partitions for possible restoration on OpenBSD, dump(8) is recommended. If you intend on restoring to non-OpenBSD environments, tar(1), cpio(1), and pax(1) all have various capabilities. There's also the gtar package, which is the GNU implementation of tar(1).
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Old 13th August 2008
milo974 milo974 is offline
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Hello,
Thank's to your ans, i want only backup my openbsd partition to a file : /nt_1/myopenbsd.img ?? i need to use dd ? How can i achieve my goal please ?
Thank's.

Last edited by milo974; 13th August 2008 at 07:43 AM. Reason: more precisions
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Old 13th August 2008
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Here is one possibility, which assumes the hard drive you want to replicate is wd0. Note that I chose to use the raw (character) device, as I have found this is usually faster than cooked (buffered) device for this sort of thing.

If the number of sectors are evenly divisible by some blocksize, you can increase the speed of replication by using the "bs=" operand. Read the dd(1) man page.

# dd if=/dev/rwd0c of=/nt_1/myopenbsd.img

Here is another method, where the output is piped through a compression step:

# dd if=/dev/rwd0c | gzip > /nt_1/myopenbsd.img.gz
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Old 13th August 2008
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Two thoughts:

  1. Since this is a network connected drive (Sharity-light or Samba) you may have filesize limitations. If so, you could use split(1) to divide your image into multiple files in the destination filesystem. e.g.:

    # mkdir -p /nt_1/myopenbsd_image# cd /nt_1/myopenbsd_image# dd if=/dev/rwd0c | gzip | split -b 1024m image.gz
  2. How will you restore your image to the disk?
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Old 14th August 2008
milo974 milo974 is offline
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i ve tried dd to backup rwd0, i saw it copied not only the system and datas but the entire partition so it takes a long time, and it is very big!
I only want to backup the partition (only system, datas, nothing else) like Norton ghost can do... Is there a way to do that ?

What i want : backup openbsd+datas to restore on an over hard disk and boot on.
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Old 14th August 2008
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As I mentioned above, and as you should have learned during installation .... the "c" partition is the entire hard drive.

As I mentioned above, dd(1) copies every sector, regardless what is in it. So if you are using dd to back up a 250GB hard drive, the output of the dd command will be 250GB.

As mentioned several times to you, the standard practice is to use tools which back up individual filesystems. Several were already mentioned: dump/restore, tar, cpio, and pax. Specifically for OpenBSD, dump/restore is most often recommended -- tar is handy for small hierarchies but is usually unable to backup complex directory structures due to filename size limitations.

For disaster recovery, the ramdisk kernel (bsd.rd) booted from installation media is typically used -- all of the built-in tools mentioned are included with that kernel. One would recreate and restore all filesystems -- if your system uses daily(8), you will find your disklabels in /var/backups, so you might restore /var first to acquire them. Note that restore(8) requires some space in /tmp, so if using bsd.rd, you will need to mount /tmp before running restore.

Installing boot blocks is done with installboot(8).
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Old 14th August 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by milo974 View Post
i ve tried dd to backup rwd0, i saw it copied not only the system and datas but the entire partition...
Backing up rwd0 will back up all partitions which reside on the disk. You may want to study the output of mount(8) (specifying no options...) to determine what partitions exist. At a minimum, you have one partition which houses the entire filesystem. The upper limit of partitions disklabel(8) can address on a single drive is 16.
Quote:
I only want to backup the partition (only system, datas, nothing else) like Norton ghost can do... Is there a way to do that ?
It sounds like you are looking for a pre-canned solution. Although there is a g4u project which was started by a big proponent of NetBSD, note that this was never ported to OpenBSD so it is not clear whether it ever reached production system quality.
Quote:
What i want : backup openbsd+datas to restore on an over hard disk and boot on.
Why do you want to repeatedly backup the system? Why not simply back up the data itself? This will take far less space & time. Again, consider the well tested solution of dump(8) & restore(8) as has been mentioned before. tar(1) is another possibility.

Lastly, it sounds like you are in a mixed shop of OpenBSD & Windows, hence your question about Ghost. You will be helping yourself by becoming familiar with the way Unix/OpenBSD treat disks. Taking the time to study Section 14 of the FAQ will have benefits down the road:

http://openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html
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