Cloning Running Linux server on Network !!!!!!!

Using dd you can create backups of an entire harddisk or just a parts of it. This is also usefull to quickly copy installations to similar machines. It will only work on disks that are exactly the same in disk geometry, meaning they have to the same model from the same brand.

full hard disk copy

# dd if=/dev/hdx of=/dev/hdy
# dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image
# dd if=/dev/hdx | gzip > /path/to/image.gz

Hdx could be hda, hdb etc. In the second example gzip is used to compress the image if it is really just a backup.

Restore Backup of hard disk copy

# dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

# gzip -dc /path/to/image.gz | dd of=/dev/hdx

MBR backup

In order to backup only the first few bytes containing the MBR and the partition table you can use dd as well.

# dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/image count=1 bs=512

MBR restore

# dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hdx

Add "count=1 bs=446" to exclude the partition table from being written to disk. You can manually restore the table.