[geeks] Disk images

[Atom]

Kurt Huhn wrote:

>On Tue, March 15, 2005 15:47, Atom said:
>  
>
>>Hey
>>
>>Does anybody know some "faster" way than 'dd' to create and restore disk
>>images in unix or *bsd.
>>
>>I need to do a whole bunch of machines soon and don't want to wait 30+
>>minutes * 600.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Faster than dd?  Whenever I need to dupe a drive, dd just screams right
>through the bus.  I can't imagine anything faster unless you're talking
>about a dedicate HD dupe machine - and then I can't imagine it being all
>that much faster.
>
>Whenever I use dd from one HD to another, I always nail the bus right to
>the wall.  I can't imagine a faster way to do it.
>  
>
Weird. Right now I am using an external firewire chassie that I created 
a 5gb diskimage with. dd if=/dev/sda of=~/mdtimage.img
and restore it with dd if=mdtimage.img of=/dev/sda

So far we are at more than 30 minutes for the restore. The external disk 
chassie is hence I need to swap the disks without having to shut down 
the machine plus the drive is a 2.5" laptop drive I am imaging.

Maybe something's funky with the firewire card i am using and slowing 
down the data flow. Going to do a few benchmarks later. It's just when I 
used the same setup using a windows application it took about 2 minutes 
to restore the diskimage.

-- Thomas