[ILUG] Cloning Linux Filesystem

[Niall O Broin]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 05:48:03PM -0500, McElwee, Shane wrote:

> I need to clone a Linux filesystem running VMware and was wondering has
> anyone out there tried this and how they went about it. 

When you say a filesystem running VMware, I presume you mean a filesystem on
which VMware is installed ? I've copied lots of filesystems, including my
current /home with my home directory in which vmware is installed. It worked
just fine.

> Are the OS's in VMware affected during imaging?

Why on earth would they be ? When VMware is not running, the installation is
just a number of files. If they're copied, what difference can that make
(ignoring bitflips caused by gamma rays here :-) )

> What's the best application to use for cloning Linux.

There was an article published recently about someone using dd to clone Linux
boxes. It was written as if the guy had invented dd, but I suppose it would
be a reasonable introduction to the ideas. I think someone on the list
posted a mention of this - I did read the article - probably linked from LWN.

I've used dd and cpio before for this purpose. find piped through cpio is
fine for moving data from one partition to another. dd can only be used to
copy a whole partition to another of identical size, but it might be a bit
quicker than dd. 

> I've used Ghostsoftware for cloning NT before but never for
> Linux. 

AFAIK Ghost doesn't understand the ext2 filesystem (and I'm sure it doesn't
understand ReiserFS) so you'd have to use the Ghost imaging option, which is
a bit slower.


> 
> Thanks
> 
> Shane
> 
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