User-Agent: IMHO/0.97.1 (Webmail for Roxen)
Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 19:53:37 -800
To: BALUG  <balug-talk@balug.org>
Subject: Re: easiest way to copy a disk or filesystem
From: Markus Gutschke <markus@gutschke.com>

> Sorry, I did not ask my orginal question properly.
> I want to copy a hard disc, bit by bit.  in a similar fashion that the
> Microsoft-based software Norton Ghost or Drive Image.   And, I hope to do it
> over a TCP network, as Norton Ghost and Drive Image.
> Is there such a counter-part within the Linux world?

On the destination machine

 nc -l -p 7777 >/dev/hda

On the source machine:

 nc destinationmachine 7777 </dev/hda

If your computer does not have a copy of "nc", then go to
http://www.freshmeat.net and ask it where to download "netcat".

Be careful that both of your machines have the exact same size
harddrive and be warned that the above will wipe out everything
on the primary IDE drive on your destination machine (replace
/dev/hda with the device name for the drives that you want to copy
from/to).

If you do not want to do a block level copy, then you are better
off copying the individual files. In order to do this, pipe tar
through netcat; try the following:

On the destination machine:

  nc -l -p 7777 | (cd destdir && tar xzvfpS - )

On the source machine:

  cd sourcedir && tar czfpS - . | nc destinationmachine 7777

Of course there are plenty of other ways to do this. "rdist" would
be an obvious example.



Markus


P.S.: I currently do not have any spare harddrives that I do not
      mind reformatting, so I have not tested any of the above. Let
      me know, if these commands do not work (you might have to
      throw "dd" into the mix, to make sure that writes to the
      block device are performed in units of 512 bytes).

-- 
Markus Gutschke                                Resonate, Inc.
3637 Fillmore Street #106                      385 Moffett Park Drive
San Francisco, CA 94123-1600                   Sunnyvale, CA 94089
+1-415-567-8449                                +1-408-548-5528
markus@gutschke.com                            mgutschk@resonate.com