Cloning partitions in linux

Disk cloning in Linux using dd command

The dd command utility is a simple yet powerful and useful command available in Unix and Linux systems which is used to convert and copy files. Unix like systems treat all devices as files and these device files are located in the /dev directory in your system. So typically your hard disk drive is a file in the /dev directory with the prefix of hd or sd (depending on IDE or SCSI driver). This concept of device as files makes dd a perfect candidate for backup and restore of disk images or cloning some partitions or the entire disk.

This article shows you some examples of how to use the dd command to backup or clone drive partitions and entire drives.

You can use the fdisk command or check the /proc/partitions to view all the disk partitions in your system.

From the above output we can deduce that you have hard disks on your system and their device file names are sda and sdb. There are two partitions in sda which are sda1 and sda2 and we also know that sda1 is a boot partition.

How to clone a partition from one disk to another

The following are the steps to create a clone of a partition from one disk to another disk, lets say for example you want to clone sda1 partition to sdb1 . In this case sda is your source disk and sdb is the destination disk.

Step 1: Create a new partition in the destination disk if it does not already exist. You can use the fdisk command to create the new partition.

Step 2: Run the dd command.

• conv=sync,noerror tells dd command to continue copying after read errors and fill input block with nulls in case partial records.
• status=progress shows progress of the copy.
• bs=64M set the block size to copy at a time. Adjust this value could improve the copying speed

How to clone an entire disk

To clone an entire disk, say for example sda to sdb , run:

When you clone a entire disk, the destination disk will get all the partitions that are on the source disk.

How to create a disk image

Before you create a disk image backup, make sure no partitions on that disk are mounted and run the following command

where sdb is the disk file name and /path/to/backup.img is the path and filename of the backup image.

Compressed disk image

You could also compress the backup image with gzip as shown in the example below

Send disk image to remote system

You could send the backup image to a remote machine using ssh as in the below example.

Split the disk image by size

You can split the disk image in to smaller pieces of any size that you specify by passing the dd output through split command.

The above command splits the backup image file to smaller files of size 50MB or less. A two letter suffix will be added to the files. The resulting files will have names backup.img.gz.aa, backup.img.gz.ab, backup.img.gz.ac.

To join the split files into a single image file, you run the command

Restoring disk image

The below command restores the disk sdb from the image file backup.img .

To restore from a compressed backup image, use the gunzip command with dd

To restore from a backup image that is compressed and split, run:

Источник

Disk cloning

Disk cloning is the process of making an image of a partition or of an entire hard drive. This can be useful for copying the drive to other computers or for backup and recovery purposes.

Contents

Using dd

Using ddrescue

ddrescue is a tool designed for cloning and recovering data. It copies data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, etc) to another, trying to rescue the good parts first in case of read errors, to maximize the recovered data.

To clone a faulty or dying drive, run ddrescue twice. For the first round, copy every block without read error and map the errors to rescue.map .

where X is the partition letter of the source and Y of the target block device.

For the second round, copy only the bad blocks and try 3 times to read from the source before giving up.

Now you can check the file system for corruption and mount the new drive.

File system cloning

This article or section needs expansion.

Using e2image

e2image is a tool included in e2fsprogs for debugging purposes. It can be used to copy ext2, ext3, and ext4 partitions efficiently by only copying the used blocks. Note that this only works for ext2, ext3, and ext4 filesystems, and the unused blocks are not copied so this may not be a useful tool if one is hoping to recover deleted files.

To clone a partition from physical disk /dev/sda , partition 1, to physical disk /dev/sdb , partition 1 with e2image, run

Disk cloning software

These applications allow easy backup of entire filesystems and recovery in case of failure, usually in the form of a Live CD or USB drive. They contain complete system images from one or more specific points in time and are frequently used to record known good configurations. See Wikipedia:Comparison of disk cloning software for their comparison.

See also Synchronization and backup programs for other applications that can take full system snapshots, among other functionality.

Источник

How to Clone a Partition or Hard drive in Linux

There are many reasons why you may want to clone a Linux partition or even hard drive, most of which are related to creating backups of your data. There are multiple ways you can achieve this in Linux by using some external tools such as partimage or Clonezilla.

However in this tutorial we are going to review Linux disk cloning with tool called dd, which is most commonly used to convert or copy files and it comes pre-installed in most Linux distributions.

How to Clone Linux Partition

With dd command you can copy entire hard drive or just a Linux partition. Lets start with cloning one of our partitions. In my case I have the following drives: /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc.. I will clone /dev/sdb1/ to /dev/sdc1.

First list the these partitions using the fdisk command as shown.

List Linux Partitions

Now clone a partition /dev/sdb1/ to /dev/sdc1 using the following dd command.

The above command tells dd to use /dev/sdb1 as input file and write it to output file /dev/sdc1.

Clone Linux Partition with dd Command

After cloning Linux partition, you can then check both partitions with:

Verify Linux Partition Cloning

How to Clone Linux Hard Drive

Cloning a Linux hard drive is similar to cloning a partition. However, instead of specifying the partition, you just use the entire drive. Note that in this case it is recommended that the hard drive is same in size (or bigger) than the source drive.

Clone Hard Drive in Linux

This should have copied the drive /dev/sdb with its partitions on the target hard drive /dev/sdc. You can verify the changes by listing both drives with fdisk command.

Verify Linux Hard Drive Cloning

How to Backup MBR in Linux

dd command can also be used to backup your MBR, which is located at the first sector of the device, before the first partition. So if you want to create backup of your MBR, simply run:

The above command tells dd to copy /dev/sda to /backup/mbr.img with step of 512 bytes and the count option tells to copy only 1 block. In other words you tell dd to copy the first 512 bytes from /dev/sda to the file you have provided.

Backup MBR in Linux

That’s all! dd command is a powerful Linux tool that should be used with caution when copying or cloning Linux partitions or drives.

If You Appreciate What We Do Here On TecMint, You Should Consider:

TecMint is the fastest growing and most trusted community site for any kind of Linux Articles, Guides and Books on the web. Millions of people visit TecMint! to search or browse the thousands of published articles available FREELY to all.

If you like what you are reading, please consider buying us a coffee ( or 2 ) as a token of appreciation.

We are thankful for your never ending support.

Источник

How to clone hard drive and partition in Linux

Hard drive or partition cloning can be used for data backup and to replicate an existing system elsewhere. It could also be used as a non-destructive method to perform hard drive forensics whereby a disk or partition is cloned, and the forensic operations are performed on the cloned image.

A few tools are available in Linux for hard drive and partition cloning, such as Partimage, Partclone, Clonezilla, and dd. dd is the simplest and is installed by default in most Linux distributions. dd is specifically developed to copy a disk or partition on a block-level directly to another disk, partition, or file.

Steps to clone hard drive and partition using dd:

For this example, we’re going to clone the sdb1 partition to an image file.

From the above lsblk output, sdb1 is a 5GB partition mounted on /mnt/data.

Target disk drive or partition needs to have at least the same capacity, and mounted partition for the target file needs to have enough free disk space. In this case, our target mounted partition still have 14GB available for the required 5GB.

Cloning an entire disk will also clone the master boot record and partition table

Comment anonymously. Login not required.

Источник

7 Best Open Source “Disk Cloning/Backup” Tools for Linux Servers

Disk cloning is the process of copying data from a hard disk to another one, in fact, you can do this process by copy & paste but you won’t be able to copy the hidden files and folders or the in-use files, that’s why you need a cloning software to do the job, also you may need the cloning process to save a backup image from your files and folders.

Basically, the cloning software job is to take all disk data, convert them into a single .img file and give it to you, so you can copy it to another hard drive, and here we have the best 7 Open Source Cloning software to do the job for you.

1. Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a Live CD based on Ubuntu & Debian to clone all your hard drive data or to take a backup, licensed under GPL 3, it is similar to Norton Ghost on Windows but more effective.

Features

1. Support for many filesystems like ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, xfs, and many other filesystems.
2. Support for BIOS and UEFI.
3. Support for MPR and GPT partitions.
4. Ability to reinstall grub 1 and 2 on any attached hard drive.
5. Works on weak computers ( 200 MB of RAM is needed only).
6. Many other features.

Clonezilla for Linux

2. Mondo Rescue

Unlike other cloning software, Mondo Rescue doesn’t convert your hard drivers into an .img file, but it will convert them into an .iso image, you can also create a custom Live CD with Mondo using “mindi” which is a special tool developed by Mondo Rescue to clone your data from the Live CD.

It supports most Linux distributions, it also supports FreeBSD, and it is licensed under GPL, You can install Mondo Rescue by using the following link.

MondoRescue

3. Partimage

Partimage is an open-source software backup, by default it works under Linux system and available to install from the package manager for most Linux distributions, if you don’t have a Linux system installed by default you can use “SystemRescueCd” which is a Live CD that include Partimage by default to do the cloning process that you want.

Partimage is very fast in cloning hard drivers, but the problem is that it doesn’t support ext4 or btrfs partitions, although that you can use it to clone other filesystems like ext3 and NTFS.

Partimage

4. FSArchiver

FSArchiver is a continuation of Partimage, also a good tool to clone hard disks, it supports cloning Ext4 partitions and NTFS partitions, here’s a list of features:

Features

1. Support for basic file attributes like owner, permissions, etc.
2. Support for extended attributes like those used by SELinux.
3. Support the basic file­system attributes (label, UUID, block­size) for all Linux file­systems.
4. Support for NTFS partitions of Windows and Ext of Linux and Unix­Like.
5. Support for checksums which enables you to check for data corruption.
6. Ability to restore corrupted archives by just skipping the corrupted file.
7. Ability to have more than one filesystem in an archive.
8. Ability to compress the archive in many formats like lzo, gzip, bzip2, lzma/xz.
9. Ability to split big files in size to a smaller one.

You can download FSArchiver and install it on your system, or you can download SystemRescueCD which also contains FSArchiver.

FSArchiver

5. Partclone

Partclone is a free tool to clone & restore partitions, written in C in first appeared in 2007, it supports many filesystems like ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, nfs, reiserfs, reiser4, hfs+, btrfs and it is very simple to use.

Licensed under GPL, it is available as a tool in Clonezilla as well, you can download it as a package.

Partclone

6. G4L

G4L is a free Live CD system to clone hard disk easily, it’s the main feature is that you can compress the filesystem, send it via FTP or CIFS or SSHFS or NFS to any location you want, it also supports GPT partitions since version 0.41, it is licensed under BSD license and available to download for free.

7. doClone

doClone is also a free software project that is developed to clone Linux system partitions easily, written in C++, it supports up to 12 different filesystems, it can perform Grub bootloader restoration and can transform the clone image to other computers via LAN, it also supports live cloning which means that you can create a clone from the system even when it is up and running, doClone.

There are many other tools to clone your Linux hard disks, Have you used any cloning software from the above list to backup your hard drivers? Which one is best for you? and also tell us if any other tool if you know, which is not listed here.

If You Appreciate What We Do Here On TecMint, You Should Consider:

TecMint is the fastest growing and most trusted community site for any kind of Linux Articles, Guides and Books on the web. Millions of people visit TecMint! to search or browse the thousands of published articles available FREELY to all.

If you like what you are reading, please consider buying us a coffee ( or 2 ) as a token of appreciation.

We are thankful for your never ending support.

Источник