On Friday 21 October 2005 15:09, Shawn Fertch wrote: > At first, I was looking at utilities such as tar or dump. However, these > to me, seem to have limitations preventing me from doing what I'm after > given the partitioning scheme and using LVM. I believe dd might be my best > option, but I'm not sure if that would be the best route as I don't want to > pull empty disk space or bad sectors that typically come with using dd. > > I've done a fair amount of googling, and reading various sources about > this. However, most only deal with physical or logical partitions being the > filesystems instead of LVM. Typically, these only cover using tar or dump > and do not address how to restore on LVM filesystems. However, if I use dd > to do the partitions, I would be taking everything on the disk including > non-essential filesystems and blank diskspace wouldn't I? With LVM it seems like there's always some undocumented, obscure tool or switch that does what you want... If you have vgcfgbackup/vgcfgrestore on those machines (that may be LVM2 specific), that's the preferred way to back up the LVM metadata. If you also back up the partition table (sfdisk is great for that), you can get your structure back very quickly. The rest could potentially be done with mkfs.*, mkswap, and tar, or even dd if you need to cut some corners. Given that you have so many different filesystems, dump won't really help you at all. You could also set up an Amanda solution for providing the data backup (it might be a little overkill) - but it doesn't sound like you have the time left to do that... Dave Carlson -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20051021/ae31cef8/attachment-0001.pgp