Archiving workstation hard drives

[Ray Arachelian]

First fill the empty space on it with zeros, remove the file with the
zeros, unmount it, then dd the whole disk, and pipe it to gzip.  Make
sure that you use the proper device name that will grab the whole disk,
bootsector, partition table, and all.

i.e.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/junk bs=65536
rm /mnt/junk
umount /mnt
dd if=/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s2 | bzip2 -9 >/somewhere-else/disk.dd.gz



Richard wrote:
> OK, suppose you have a workstation and it has stuff installed on its
> drives.  You don't have the original distribution media for the OS and
> any installed applications and you don't have a spare system with the
> same stuff installed.
>
> What's the best way to make a backup of the entire hard drive so that
> the essential software doesn't get lost?
>
> The drives are SCSI.
>