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Possible Duplicate:
How to clone a hard drive to an image that I can open later?

This question stemed from my other question:

How do I make a bit copy of my internal hard drive to an external hard drive and check the disk for errors?

Community
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2 Answers2

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if your external harddrive is larger than your internal i would use

sudo ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb logfile

note: sda is your source disk sdb is your destination drive (external). this will also overwrite any data on your external drive

you can install ddrescue via sudo apt-get install ddrescue

i prefer ddrescue over normal dd becasue it gives you a nice progress bar and it will log i/o errors

max
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I regularly make complete hardrive copies using Clonezilla.

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery.

I recommend downloading the live version and boot your computer from it then you can make a complete copy of the harddrive to and external drive or network drive. Clonezilla will also run checks if you wish during and after creating the copy.

References:

Clonezilla Website

CoalaWeb
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