full backup remotely?

[guy keren]

fools - listen to oleg - use 'dump' and 'restore'.

--guy

Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 12:35:48AM +0200, sammy ominsky wrote:
>> On 31/12/2009, at 00:27, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
>>
>>> doing the backup. dd is nice, but that will copy also the empty space
>>> (although it won't have impact on the size of the backup, it will have an
>>> impact on the time it takes). 
>> dd has a --sparse flag which makes it not copy empty space.
> 
> I don't see such a flag in the man page.
> 
> partimage avoids copying any "free" block (block marked as free by the
> file system). If that block also happens to be zeroed out, dd is not
> aware of such details. And frankly can't safely be aware of them if Hetz
> want to copy a mounted partition.
> 
> Also note that if you use dd to copy a mounted partition, you copy
> different parts of it in different times. This is tricky at best. Unless
> you e.g. use an LVM with a snapshot.
> 
> tar (or any other backup of files) is safer. Even there you don't get a
> complete snapshot of the system. But at least every file is valid.
>