Ubuntu – Copy an image of a disk to an external drive

backupclonedisk-image

Is am trying to make a copy of a file structure (& an image) from a drive that I have identified as

/dev/sda

(Contains /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5)

The drive identifying itself as /dev/sdc1 which is an external drive with 1.8TB, has 600+ Gigs of space left. When trying to manipulate it in the GUI all I got was an error saying that the space couldn't be allocated. The drive being copied and imaged is ~64GB.

The source partitions & drive list as not mounted, the target drive is mounted. The device my Ubuntu is on is /dev/sdb1 (the sd card) and is mounted.

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc1 conv,noerror,sync

I know from what has been said in a previous question would copy blah1 on to blah2 but one concern I have is /dev/sdc1 the target has 1.4T of files on it and I don't want to risk that data being overwritten, I need an accessible format, meaning I can open the image and read the content and extract if needed, which is likely to be a daily occurrence.

I saw a site that gave an example

dd if=/dev/sdXY | zip --compression-method bzip2 image-file.zip -

which is zip, what I need. I don't know how to express the target /path/to/backup.img.gz to put the image in to a folder on /dev/sdc1. Would I be correct in saying that

dd if=/dev/sda conv=sync,noerror | zip --compression-method bzip2 /dev/sdc1 /folder-name/image-file.zip

is that the way to do it?

Also, can an iso be made and mounted? I am looking for the least risky route, the partition 2 in the extended partition /dev/sda2 of /dev/sda has data I need.

Using a terminal, how do I overcome these issues, what's right or wrong with my attempts?

EDIT

I get an error

cat /dev/sda | zip --compression-method bzip2 /media/mark/Seagate Expansion Drive/restore_point_image/restore/kingston_ssd_drive.img.zip
zip warning: name not matched: Expansion
zip warning: name not matched: Drive/restore_point_image/restore/kingston_ssd_drive.img.zip

zip error: Nothing to do! (/media/mark/Seagate.zip)

and trying gzip results in the same error, so I tried to refer to the drive partition by-id with

cat /dev/sda | zip --compression-method bzip /wwn-0x5000c500528232f8-part1/restore_point_image/restore/kingston_ssd_drive.img.zip

and get an error

zip error: Nothing to do! (/wwn-0x5000c500528232f8-part1/restore_point.img.zip)

The 64GB drive was unmounted, the external drive mounter, everything seemed set, but now this!

So I tried to change the drive label and that resulted in a warning that it couldn't be done, I was and still am logged in as root.

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

The error was overcome with the suggestion to "quote" the path

so:

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip - c > "/media/mark/Seagate Expansion Drive/ssd.img.gz"

is currently building an archive (finally).

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – GZip of drive image created by using `dd` command

If the disk is almost full, there is no sense in compressing the image; it will take ages with no practical effect. And restoring will be much slower too.

dd copies physical, byte-by-byte partitions or disks. It works by reading N bytes from the input and writing them to the output, and then repeating. N is by default 512 bytes.

To copy a disk/partition physically, use

dd bs=10M if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/dest/image.img

this will read blocks of 10Mbytes at a time. If you have plenty of RAM you can up that number too. The size of the file will be exactly the same as the size of the disk/partition used (but it can occupy less disk sometime --- dd can create sparse files).

You can check the progress in another terminal with

ls -lh /path/to/dest/image.img

which will give you the size of the image file (more or less --- it will be in chunks, really).

Triple check (with mount) that no partition of the disk to copy is mounted or used anywhere, or the created image will be invalid (and worst things can happen, too). Be careful about swap areas, too.

You can mount the image to check if it's ok with a loopback filesystem and a bit of tricks.

Anyway, there are also tools that helps the tasks: How to make a disk image and restore from it later?

If your system is not recent (the system from where you are booting, I mean), be warned of this bug --- fixed from 14.04 onward, but still there for older kernels.

Ubuntu – Cloning multiple partitions in Ubuntu

Just dd the section of the disk that goes from the start of the disk to the end of the last partition.

In your case the last partition is /dev/sdb3, so:

Find /dev/sdb3's end using sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdb (End column);
dd the section of the drive that goes from the start of the disk to the end of /dev/sdb3 (let's assume that the end of /dev/sdb3 is on byte 50000000000 and that the target drive is /dev/sdc for the sake of the example): sudo dd if=/dev/sdb | head -c 50000000000 | sudo tee /dev/sdc

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – GZip of drive image created by using `dd` command

Ubuntu – Cloning multiple partitions in Ubuntu

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