How to back up a hard disk to another machine

[rrolsbe]

valpy, my apologies about Pudd and wiping unused areas of file systems with zeros. You are quite correct that for a partition (ie file system) it does offer such an option. I missed that. Note that it doesn't do this when backing up an entire drive (which is what I want). I may spend a little time writing an enhancement to Pudd to do that. Pudd is quite an impressive piece of work as it is.

Thank you all for your helpful and patient posts.

I use Puppy Linux at home. It is regarded as a personal toy at work, but with its excellent hardware detection and Pudd that attitude may change...

Jeffrey

Don't know if a puppy package is available that has the unix split command but adding the split command to the Pudd disk backup utility would be great. UPDATE: Looks like split is in puppy 2.16 it was not in my version of puppy 2.13.

See more into at the following link:
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd

The Pudd backup utility is great now but it could be fantastic.

Regards
Ron

[rrolsbe]

First I performed a partition backup and selected zero blank space the partition backup file size of sda1 was 2.7G.

Then I backed up entire drive and file size was HUGE. Had to stop the backup at 25G before it filled the destination drive. Since the other two partitions are very small in comparision to /sda1 (see fdisk below), can anyone explain this?? Has anyone had similar experience?

sh-3.00# ls -alh ubu*
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25G 2007-05-06 12:08 ubuntu6.10_drive.img.gz
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2.7G 2007-05-04 10:48 ubuntu_sda1_partition.img.gz


sh-3.00# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 1262 10136983+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 1263 1467 1646662+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 1263 1467 1646631 82 Linux swap / Solaris

sda2 & sda5 together only about 20% of sda1

Update: Looks like I am may only be using slightly over 10G of the 40G, not sure why took the suggested ubuntu install defaults. The other 30G gig probably has truely random data.

Regards
Ron