Backing up an entire hard drive under UNIX
This article walks you through the process needed to create an identical copy of an entire disk under UNIX. It is useful to create a system image for installation or backup purposes. You will need a second hard drive of the same or larger size as a destination for the backup. The disk created will be full bootable; in the event of a drive failure, this backup drive can be swapped in for the previous drive and the system will boot and be in the same state that it was in when the backup was made. While booting off a drive that believes that it is a powered-on system is not ideal, it can get you back into operation quickly. In addition, the backup disk can be used as a perfect copy of the file structure, in case of permissions problems or data corruption.
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