Cloning a disk

[Michael Hopkins]

Hi all

What are people's preferences here on how to clone a server disk to a new
larger one? Am about to replace 60G IDE with faster 250G SATA.

I would like it to:

- be difficult to mess up, preferably a debian/ubuntu package that takes
care of all messy details e.g. symlinks, permissions, dates

- be completely reliable

- avoid fiddling about too much i.e. the use of floppies or ftp servers

TIA

Michael


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[Robert Hull]

In uk.comp.os.linux, on Mon 08 May 2006 12:28, Michael Hopkins
<michael.hopkins@hopkins-research.com> wrote:

> What are people's preferences here on how to clone a server disk to a
> new larger one? Am about to replace 60G IDE with faster 250G SATA.

man fdisk
man cp (pay attention to the -a option)

>
> I would like it to:
>
> - be difficult to mess up,

fdisk is not very easy to mess up

cp will not copy nothing over something so is also hard to mess up

> preferably a debian/ubuntu package

Sorry, fdisk and cp are basic shell commands rather than a debian
package :-(

>
> that takes care of all messy details e.g. symlinks, permissions,
> dates

cp -a does this

>
> - be completely reliable

cp is very reliable

>
> - avoid fiddling about too much i.e. the use of floppies or ftp
> servers
>

No need for either

> TIA
>
> Michael
>
>
>

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>
> _/ _/ _/_/_/ Hopkins Research Ltd
> _/ _/ _/ _/
> _/_/_/_/ _/_/_/ [url]http://www.hopkins-research.com/[/url]
> _/ _/ _/ _/
> _/ _/ _/ _/ 'touch the future'
>
>

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Please correct your .sig separator
--
Robert HULL

Archival or publication of this article on any part of thisishull.net
is without consent and is in direct breach of the Data Protection Act

[VS]

Michael Hopkins wrote:

>
> Hi all
>
> What are people's preferences here on how to clone a server disk to a new
> larger one? Am about to replace 60G IDE with faster 250G SATA.
>
> I would like it to:
>
> - be difficult to mess up, preferably a debian/ubuntu package that takes
> care of all messy details e.g. symlinks, permissions, dates
>
> - be completely reliable
>
> - avoid fiddling about too much i.e. the use of floppies or ftp servers
>
> TIA
>
> Michael

Hi Michael,

The disk-duplicator program (man dd) can be used to copy partitions
across disks, and may be worth looking at. Since it copies whole
partitions, symlinks, permissions, etc. are maintained across copies.

If both hard disks are on the same machine, booting off Knoppix and
copying partitions should be fairly easy. For eg: dd if=/dev/hda1
of=/dev/sda1

Regards,
Vinay.

[Greg Hennessy]

On Mon, 08 May 2006 12:28:45 +0100, Michael Hopkins
<michael.hopkins@hopkins-research.com> wrote:

>
>
>Hi all
>
>What are people's preferences here on how to clone a server disk to a new
>larger one? Am about to replace 60G IDE with faster 250G SATA.
>
>I would like it to:
>
> - be difficult to mess up, preferably a debian/ubuntu package that takes
> care of all messy details e.g. symlinks, permissions, dates
>
> - be completely reliable
>
> - avoid fiddling about too much i.e. the use of floppies or ftp servers

Download the bootable iso of G4U and use it.


[url]http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/[/url]


greg
--
Every Villian Is Lemons

[Rikishi 42]

Michael Hopkins wrote:

> What are people's preferences here on how to clone a server disk to a new
> larger one? Am about to replace 60G IDE with faster 250G SATA.

Put the new disk in the machine, partition it and use somthing like:
cp -var /source/ /destination/

> I would like it to:
>
> - be difficult to mess up, preferably a debian/ubuntu package that takes
> care of all messy details e.g. symlinks, permissions, dates

Check.

> - be completely reliable

You'd get an error message, if there was a problem.

> - avoid fiddling about too much i.e. the use of floppies or ftp servers

Fiddle-free.


--
Research is what I'm doing, when I don't know what I'm doing.
(von Braun)

[Michael Hopkins]

On 8/5/06 22:45, in article [email]ioq4j3-431.ln1@whisper.geuens.org[/email], "Rikishi 42"
<fsck_spam@telenet.be> wrote:

> Michael Hopkins wrote:
>

>> What are people's preferences here on how to clone a server disk to a new
>> larger one? Am about to replace 60G IDE with faster 250G SATA.

> Put the new disk in the machine, partition it and use somthing like:
> cp -var /source/ /destination/
>

>> I would like it to:
>>
>> - be difficult to mess up, preferably a debian/ubuntu package that takes
>> care of all messy details e.g. symlinks, permissions, dates

> Check.
>

>> - be completely reliable

> You'd get an error message, if there was a problem.
>

>> - avoid fiddling about too much i.e. the use of floppies or ftp servers

> Fiddle-free.
>

Thanks to all for suggestions.

I am used to rsync, so I will probably partition disk and then go that way
with excludes for /swap & such. I hadn't thought about cp -var but may look
into that too.

M


_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

_/ _/ _/_/_/ Hopkins Research Ltd
_/ _/ _/ _/
_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/ [url]http://www.hopkins-research.com/[/url]
_/ _/ _/ _/
_/ _/ _/ _/ 'touch the future'

_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/

[Gordon Henderson]

In article <hIL7g.84335$dW3.22247@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com> ,
VS <vs@noidea.net> wrote:

>The disk-duplicator program (man dd) can be used to copy partitions
>across disks, and may be worth looking at. Since it copies whole
>partitions, symlinks, permissions, etc. are maintained across copies.

I'm just being a boring old fart who'd been using *nix for almost 30
years now... dd means convert and copy, but cc had already been used.

It's original use was for converting tape files, and dealing with EBCDIC
and ASCII conversions.

However, it does copy disks and partitions quite well.

The down-side is that the partitions & disks need to be exactly the same
size to do the copy successfully, and although there does exist various
partition and filesystem re-sizing utilities, you're far better off
without them IMO unless it's a real emergency, or you have no other
choice.

Gordon

[Simon Waters]

On Mon, 08 May 2006 23:01:44 +0100, Michael Hopkins wrote:

>
> Thanks to all for suggestions.
>
> I am used to rsync, so I will probably partition disk and then go that way
> with excludes for /swap & such. I hadn't thought about cp -var but may look
> into that too.

I've just been through both with Debian Sarge,
dd and rsync copies of boxes.

I much preferred dd, which also does XP disk upgrades fine as well;
[url]http://www.debian-administration.org/users/simonw/weblog/34[/url]

Roughly the rsync route was;

Base install on new server.
Sync apt settings (used rsync on /etc/apt). apt-get update.
Use dpkg set selection to match up the base systems (probably not strictly
required as rsync does most of this, but I figured better safe than
sorry). I manually changed the kernel entries and one or two others in the
selection file.

Then (and it'll need customising).

rsync -avz \
--exclude /etc/apt \
--exclude /sys \
--exclude /dev \
--exclude /proc \
--exclude /boot \
--exclude "/vmlinu*" \
--exclude "/initrd*" \
--exclude /etc/network \
--exclude /etc/modules \
--exclude /etc/modules.conf \
--exclude /lib/modules \
--exclude /etc/mdadm \
--exclude /etc/fstab \
--exclude /etc/mtab \
--exclude "/var/lib/dpkg/info/kernel-image-2.4.27-2-686-smp*" \
--exclude "/var/lib/dpkg/info/kernel-image-2.6.8-2-386*" \
--exclude /var/spool \
--exclude /var/run \
/ $DESTINATION:/

I then had separate scripts to sync some data from "/var/spool" once the
mail server and other services were stopped. And also one to sort out
"/etc/network/interfaces".

I also wrote a script to stop/start services on both boxes (same set of
services of course, so same script), since that is useful, and easier than
single user mode.

Running "update-grub" on the target is a good idea afterwards depending
what happened to the kernel packages, but of course grub give you plenty
of scope to TRY(!) and rescue things if you didn't.

Chances are your mileage will vary -- I had to mess about a bit because
the new machine couldn't use the same stock Debian kernels as the old. So
far my frankstein machine doesn't show any ill effects from the move, and
I used the same scripts to clone it back to the original when the hardware
was fixed.

I also did the odd "apt-get clean" and purged CPAN cache, and excluded
backups etc, to speed the process before I ran the rsync.

The good thing about rsync is you can do it again after testing, if it
didn't work. But note I didn't include "--delete" so you risk accumulating
spare files.

Compared to "dd" this all seems very hit and miss to me, I have more faith
in gparted, and the ability of most modern filesystems to be resized, than
in my ability to get this transfer 100%.

Although generally for dd you ideally want a large external hard disk,
and plenty of down time, the sarge server I did got swapped with less than
5 minutes down time, and most of that was me manually running a handful
of scripts, and a reboot to make sure it looked solid.

Use "dd", live less close to the edge.