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It's not naive at all. There are a plethora of situations/reasons where one may want or need a block level image backup.
by relaxitup 13y ago
It's not naive at all. There are a plethora of situations/reasons where one may want or need a block level image backup.
- seunosewa 13y agoFor example...
- allgood38 13y agoWell, it provides a perfect copy of the drive, not just a copy on another file system. I've actually been able to restore to a drive, and when it boots its as though nothing ever happened. Plus its fast. Its eerie to turn the computer on after knowing you formatted the drive for whatever reason, and your desktop pops up again.
- gizmo686 13y agoIt stops being eerie after a while. Several months ago, my brother was putting together a computer and wanted to test it (ie. the motherboard) before attaching any peripherals (other than the monitor). Obviously, installing the OS on the HD to do this was out of the question, so I just copied my computer onto a thumb-drive and used that. I didn't dd it, but just copied my filesystem over and did a grub-install.
- Gorpus 13y agoLike when? Scenario 1: I boot my PC up from a live CD do dd clone the main drive, since it's a bad idea to try to do it online. I create a giant, 500 gigabyte file containing every bit on my main hard drive. This takes 20 hours. A month later my hard drive crashes and I want to restore it. I put in new hard drive, boot from live CD, and write my giant 500 gigabyte file onto the new drive and reboot. This takes 18 hours. Voila, I have my setup... from a month ago. Scenario 2: I have a cron job to run rsync on a few folders that I care about. Rsync copies them over the network to my NAS. It runs every 12 hours and only copies the diffs. My main drive crashes. I put in a new one, re-install Linux (good opportunity to upgrade distributions), and sync my data back over. The whole process takes 2 hours. So yeah. Incredibly naive. Sorry.