Re: [gentoo-server] Imaging software for a production server

[Matthias Bethke <Matthias.Bethke@gmx.net>]

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Hi Marton,
on Friday, 2005-09-02 at 12:40:06, you wrote:
> Maybe you could use 'dd if=/dev/hdx of=/path/to/destination/file' or 
> something similar though you have to choose another partition for the image.

Don't do that. It will appear to work but usually introduces subtle
inconsistencies in the FS structure that fsck may or may not catch,
especially when there's constant FS activity like on a mail server. This
is only safe for partitions that are mounted read-only.
I haven't done anything like this, and I'd think it's not really
necessary when you have several machines available anyway (each usually
with several partitions, unlike Windows where that's a necessary
feature) but I'd suggest dump(1). dump can exclude inodes, so something
like

touch dumpfile
dump -f- -e$(ls -i dumpfile | sed 's/ [[:alpha:]]\+//') /some/mount/point

should do roughly what you want. If you use EXT[23] FS that is...

regards
	Matthias
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