# Elite Hard Drive: can the JMFS software copy it ?



## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

If one gets the TiVo Elite can one use the JMFS TP upgrade software to make a working copy of the original Elite Hard Drive so when the Hard Drive goes one would have the means to fix the Elite without sending it out to someone ??


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

You can but it would be the size of the drive. So a 2TB drive will have a 2TB backup image.

I don't think you can make a truncated image for premiers at this time...


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lessd said:


> If one gets the TiVo Elite can one use the JMFS TP upgrade software to make a working copy of the original Elite Hard Drive so when the Hard Drive goes one would have the means to fix the Elite without sending it out to someone ??


Since you can't make a truncated image backup of the S4s, and have to basically Xerox the drive onto another of the same size (or larger), don't bother with jmfs, just boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 and

dd_rescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

assuming, of course that your source is sda and your target is sdb

The

-v

is so that you can see what's going on.

After a while the screen will blank, just hit the spacebar to bring it back up.

It'll probably be quicker than jmfs, but it'll still take forever.

Does the Elite have a 2TB drive?

You can dd_rescue onto a larger drive which you may not be actually able to use in the TiVo (for one thing it'll have the partition map of the smaller drive and I don't know if that will cause confusion or not), but you can then dd_rescue back onto a drive with the same LBA number as the original source and everything will land in the right place before it says out of room on the target drive, so a 2TB Xeroxed to a 2.5TB or 3TB will be a non-swappable backup.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

unitron said:


> Since you can't make a truncated image backup of the S4s, and have to basically Xerox the drive onto another of the same size (or larger), don't bother with jmfs, just boot with the MFS Live cd v1.4 and
> 
> dd_rescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb
> 
> ...


I know you can use the dd method but what i wanted to know is if the JMFS TP upgrade software that I already have can be used to dup the drive, not to make it bigger just to have something to fix the Elite years down the road if and when the Elite Hard Drive goes bad (and I can't remember the dd command), I know that i would have to purchase a 2Gb drive and not use it, when the price comes back down to the $70 or so range I think it would be good insurance to have for the Elite that cost close to $1000 with Lifetime service.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lessd said:


> I know you can use the dd method but what i wanted to know is if the JMFS TP upgrade software that I already have can be used to dup the drive, not to make it bigger just to have something to fix the Elite years down the road if and when the Elite Hard Drive goes bad (and I can't remember the dd command), I know that i would have to purchase a 2Gb drive and not use it, when the price comes back down to the $70 or so range I think it would be good insurance to have for the Elite that cost close to $1000 with Lifetime service.


The current version of jmfs (1.04 or 104) does have a copy option separate from the expand option, but I don't know if it, like Instant Cake, will balk if it isn't going onto a target drive that's larger than the source drive, whereas dd_rescue, available on the MFS Live cd v1.4, of which everyone should have a copy even if they don't own a TiVo, will do it without knowing or caring that it's working from a TiVo drive, it just copies bytes.

If you go from a source drive to a target drive with the same LBA number it gives you an exact Xerox. If you go to a larger drive you can go from that to a third drive with the same LBA number as the first drive, and it'll be the same as if you copied straight from the first drive to the third.

This is not a good time to have to spend (a lot of ) money on a hard drive, but the only way to back up a Premiere or Elite or any of the other variations of the Series 4 TiVo hard drives is to make a full size copy, and to the best of my knowledge I've told you the fastest way to do it. (MFS Live--dd_rescue)

If jmfs can, and will, do it, it'll take at least as long and probably longer, based on my experience with it so far.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

unitron said:


> ...whereas dd_rescue, available on the MFS Live cd v1.4, of which everyone should have a copy even if they don't own a TiVo, will do it without knowing or caring that it's working from a TiVo drive, it just copies bytes.


Interesting. Have you ever used dd_rescue to clone a Windows drive? I currently use Clonezilla to make cloned backups of my various PCs and I suspect that it runs something similar to or exactly like the dd command. I'm not a Linux guy so most of what scrolls by doesn't register.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lillevig said:


> Interesting. Have you ever used dd_rescue to clone a Windows drive? ...


More times than I can remember.

I've used it recently to park a 200GB drive on a 1TB drive so that I could temporarily use the 200 for something else, then copied back off of the 1TB onto the 200, and since the partion table and MBR were all part of what got copied, the 200 has no idea anything's changed.

As I said, it copies bytes and has no idea what, if anything, is on them.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

lillevig said:


> Interesting. Have you ever used dd_rescue to clone a Windows drive? I currently use Clonezilla to make cloned backups of my various PCs and I suspect that it runs something similar to or exactly like the dd command. I'm not a Linux guy so most of what scrolls by doesn't register.


Why clone a windows drive???

I never keep anything I want on the same partition as the OS this way of the OS has to be wiped all my other stuff will still be in place. I also have some important files that I keep backed up to a sandisk. I have a piece of software that backs up those directories nightly...

Buying a drive just to close a drive is like buying insurance on your insurance. Using my method I have files that originated on my old win 3.1 machine.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Soapm said:


> Why clone a windows drive???
> 
> I never keep anything I want on the same partition as the OS this way of the OS has to be wiped all my other stuff will still be in place. I also have some important files that I keep backed up to a sandisk. I have a piece of software that backs up those directories nightly...
> 
> Buying a drive just to close a drive is like buying insurance on your insurance. Using my method I have files that originated on my old win 3.1 machine.


We all do what we feel most comfortable doing. In my case, my drives are only 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB so having exact duplicate drives really isn't wasting a lot of hardware. It's especially good for my desktop (500GB) because I could just swap out one drive for the other since they are identical hardware. Through the years I have used everything from floppies to digital tape to Zip drives to CDs and DVDs for backups. Call it laziness or call it paranoia, cloning the drive is what I've settled on after a couple of decades of owning PCs.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

Sorry if I sounded condescending. That wasn't my intent.

I agree to each his own but I was pointing out that saving the files and not the applications really saves a lot of archive space.

Just curious, how do you keep the clones updates with recent files?

I ask that because there is a process called mirroring where two drives will have the same content which means if one fails the other is up to date...


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Soapm said:


> Sorry if I sounded condescending. That wasn't my intent.
> 
> I agree to each his own but I was pointing out that saving the files and not the applications really saves a lot of archive space.
> 
> ...


I like backing up my total Windows drive, so if i have any problem I can restore the total drive in 15 minutes or so with all files and settings and not have to load Windows and programs again, I use Farstone Drive Clone Pro, that may work on a TiVo disk for a total copy, but i never tried to do that.

What I wanted to know is if anybody has backed up the Elite Hard Drive using the JMFS upgrade system and tested that the backup works in the Elite, everything else is only speculation as to what will or will not work on the TiVo Elite. I don't want to purchase one unless I know for sure that it can be backup using the JMFS, as i don't have to remember anything using that software.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

jfms doesn't back up per se... it makes a copy. Yes, I have copied images to one drive to another many times using jfms and as long as it recognizes the drive it does just fine. Takes a while but does fine.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

Soapm said:


> jfms doesn't back up per se... it makes a copy. Yes, I have copied images to one drive to another many times using jfms and as long as it recognizes the drive it does just fine. Takes a while but does fine.


jmfs takes forever compared to dd_rescue and I would only use it if I were going onto a larger drive and didn't want the partition map of the smaller drive retained, in other words if my next step was to expand.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

unitron said:


> jmfs takes forever compared to dd_rescue and I would only use it if I were going onto a larger drive and didn't want the partition map of the smaller drive retained, in other words if my next step was to expand.


That brings up another question: Could you do the fast copy with dd_rescue and then just run JMFS to do the expansion?


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Soapm said:


> Sorry if I sounded condescending. That wasn't my intent.
> 
> I agree to each his own but I was pointing out that saving the files and not the applications really saves a lot of archive space.
> 
> ...


Cloning is for recovery from a catastrophic failure like a drive crash or a really bad virus. I don't have that many individual file updates that I worry about so an occasional backup of My Documents is about all I need to do. Mirroring won't necessarily protect against power line surges or viruses. My desktop used to be setup for RAID but I decided that was false security and a waste of resources.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lillevig said:


> That brings up another question: Could you do the fast copy with dd_rescue and then just run JMFS to do the expansion?


In the recent case where I went from the stock 160 to a 1TB, upping the swap partition size and using WinMFS to expand so as to not wind up with an Apple Free partition at the end, when I went to go from the 1TB to a 2TB, I could have copied via dd_rescue and not had a 1TB Apple Free Partition because the 2TB would have had the partition map of the 1TB, since dd_rescue just blindly copies bytes without taking notice of what they are, but I don't know if then running jmfs to expand into that second TB on the 2TB drive would have failed because of jmfs choking on that 1TB partition map on the 2TB or not, and I didn't want to keep experimenting, I wanted to get that S3 HD up and running on the 2TB drive.

If someone wants to send me another S3 HD, I've still got the 1TB not re-used yet, and another 2TB drive, so I could try it and see.

There's a $25 HD on the Rochester Craigslist, but I haven't heard back from them (and probably won't).


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Soapm said:


> jfms doesn't back up per se... it makes a copy. Yes, I have copied images to one drive to another many times using jfms and as long as it recognizes the drive it does just fine. Takes a while but does fine.


I done that also with the TP many times myself, I just leave it for the night, don't care how long it takes. My question is this: will that copy process work on the Elite, will the JMFS software* recognize *the TiVo Elite hard drive, does anyone know for sure that it does?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lessd said:


> I done that also with the TP many times myself, I just leave it for the night, don't care how long it takes. My question is this: will that copy process work on the Elite, will the JMFS software* recognize *the TiVo Elite hard drive, does anyone know for sure that it does?


If the Elite, like the previous S4s, can't use a drive larger than 2TB, regardless of how much of it is actually used or what the partition map claims, your question may be intellectually interesting but otherwise pointless.

The Elite comes with a 2TB drive, doesn't it?

Like other S4s, I assume the only way to back it up is to clone/Xerox it, which means another 2TB drive, unless you use one of the dd programs to copy it to a larger than 2TB drive with the intention of dd-ing back to a 2TB if ever necessary.

If you're doing that, just using jmfs to make a clone/Xerox is just doing it the time-consuming way.

If the Elite can actually recognize, on the level below software, a 2.5 or 3TB drive, then it's a different story, although whether jmfs can recognize an Elite drive as a TiVo drive is one question, whether it can copy it to another 2TB drive is another question, whether it can copy it to a larger than 2TB drive yet another question, whether it can copy it to a larger than 2TB drive and then expand it is really the question that makes any of this of any interest, and, if not, then whether you can dd to a larger than 2TB drive and then somehow trick jmfs into expanding that becomes of interest.

I think the only way we're going to find out involves you buying an Elite, a spare 2TB drive, a 2.5TB drive, and a 3TB drive, and spending a lot of time experimenting.

You've got lots of spare time and money, right?


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

lessd said:


> I done that also with the TP many times myself, I just leave it for the night, don't care how long it takes. My question is this: will that copy process work on the Elite, will the JMFS software* recognize *the TiVo Elite hard drive, does anyone know for sure that it does?


I don't know for sure about the Elite but it recognizes both my TivoHD and Premier (not THX). I would think the file system is the same as the Premier so my gut says yes it should recognize it but I don't know it as fact...


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

unitron said:


> If the Elite, like the previous S4s, can't use a drive larger than 2TB, regardless of how much of it is actually used or what the partition map claims, your question may be intellectually interesting but otherwise pointless.
> 
> The Elite comes with a 2TB drive, doesn't it?
> 
> ...


You are misunderstand me, I don't care about expanding the drive in the Elite, I just want a copy so when the drive goes bad (and it will someday) I don't have to depend on anybody for me to get it working again. I know I will be tying up a 2Tb hard drive for some years but for me that cheap insurance. (When the 2TB drives gets back down to $70 or so.)


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lessd said:


> You are misunderstand me, I don't care about expanding the drive in the Elite, I just want a copy so when the drive goes bad (and it will someday) I don't have to depend on anybody for me to get it working again. I know I will be tying up a 2Tb hard drive for some years but for me that cheap insurance. (When the 2TB drives gets back down to $70 or so.)


In that case get another 2TB drive with the same (or larger) LBA number, and use dd_rescue from the MFS Live cd and "Xerox" it at the byte level instead of worrying about whether somebody's upgrade/expansion software speaks the right dialect of TiVo.

If you get the same model of drive and make the original one sda and the backup sdb, then

dd_rescue -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb

will give you an exact copy you can pop into the TiVo and it won't know the difference.

Although it that case I'd put the backup drive in and set the original on the shelf.

However, before you do that, you could hook up (to the computer) just the drive you copied on to, leaving the original safe and unconnected, and then boot with the jmfs cd and see if it recognizes the drive as a TiVo drive just to satisfy everybody's curiousity, and if it screws up the drive, just dd_rescue onto it from the original again.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

unitron said:


> In that case get another 2TB drive with the same (or larger) LBA number, and use dd_rescue from the MFS Live cd and "Xerox" it at the byte level instead of worrying about whether somebody's upgrade/expansion software speaks the right dialect of TiVo.
> 
> If you get the same model of drive and make the original one sda and the backup sdb, then
> 
> ...


Now you understand me but I don't own the Elite yet so i can't do your experiment with the drives, I wanted to know if anybody has already done this test using the JMFS software.


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## Stuxnet (Feb 9, 2011)

Soapm said:


> Why clone a windows drive???
> 
> I never keep anything I want on the same partition as the OS this way of the OS has to be wiped all my other stuff will still be in place. I also have some important files that I keep backed up to a sandisk. I have a piece of software that backs up those directories nightly...
> 
> Buying a drive just to close a drive is like buying insurance on your insurance. Using my method I have files that originated on my old win 3.1 machine.


What about your reg entries? If you wipe your WinOS and reinstall, the registry is recreated, and all those apps you have installed elsewhere need to be reinstalled to repopulate the registry... otherwise most apps residing on another partition will be crippled.

You'll have even greater probs if your new Win install things your user folders are on "C" when they actually are on "D" or "E"... Win ain't Linux...


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

Stuxnet said:


> What about your reg entries? If you wipe your WinOS and reinstall, the registry is recreated, and all those apps you have installed elsewhere need to be reinstalled to repopulate the registry... otherwise most apps residing on another partition will be crippled.
> 
> You'll have even greater probs if your new Win install things your user folders are on "C" when they actually are on "D" or "E"... Win ain't Linux...


I don't back up the applications and I do install them all on the C drive. If they get lost I can just reinstall them with the OS. What I back up are the documents...


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

Soapm said:


> I don't back up the applications and I do install them all on the C drive. If they get lost I can just reinstall them with the OS. What I back up are the documents...


That a pain, I just back up the total drive so I don't have to reset my settings for each program I have loaded and than the activation codes may not work as MS may think your installing the program on another computer. I keep music, pictures and movies on another drive, so my main drive C takes me about 10 minutes to backup, and restore only takes about 15 minutes. To do a new install of Windows 7 with all the updates can take hours. I have a Window 7 upgrade disk so for me to do a new install I first would have to install Windows XP SP3.


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

lessd said:


> That a pain, I just back up the total drive so I don't have to reset my settings for each program I have loaded and than the activation codes may not work as MS may think your installing the program on another computer. I keep music, pictures and movies on another drive, so my main drive C takes me about 10 minutes to backup, and restore only takes about 15 minutes. To do a new install of Windows 7 with all the updates can take hours. I have a Window 7 upgrade disk so for me to do a new install I first would have to install Windows XP SP3.


I never thought of it that way which is why I was asking. I guess I need to move to the new century because I spend days reloading if I get a virus or crash for some reason... And you can never get it back to the way you had it.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

lessd said:


> To do a new install of Windows 7 with all the updates can take hours. I have a Window 7 upgrade disk so for me to do a new install I first would have to install Windows XP SP3.


Same for me on my desktop. Had to do a full reinstall of programs when I upgraded to WIN 7 because I was going from 32-bit OS to 64-bit OS. One good side effect was that I got rid of some of the junk I no longer really used. One bad side effect was that I lost the use of some old 16-bit DOS programs. That's when I discovered DOSBox and the D-Fend Reloaded shell - thanks to my daughter.


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## lessd (Jan 23, 2005)

lillevig said:


> Same for me on my desktop. Had to do a full reinstall of programs when I upgraded to WIN 7 because I was going from 32-bit OS to 64-bit OS. One good side effect was that I got rid of some of the junk I no longer really used. One bad side effect was that I lost the use of some old 16-bit DOS programs. That's when I discovered DOSBox and the D-Fend Reloaded shell - thanks to my daughter.


With Windows 7 professional you can run a window of XP inside Windows 7, the software including XP is free from MS. You can than load 16 bit programs without even loading the XP window each time, works great.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

lessd said:


> With Windows 7 professional you can run a window of XP inside Windows 7, the software including XP is free from MS. You can than load 16 bit programs without even loading the XP window each time, works great.


Didn't know Professional had that feature. Then again, I'm too cheap to buy the Professional version so I went with Freeware.


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## JoeTaxpayer (Dec 23, 2008)

If I'm reading all this correctly, JMFS will work, just take a long time.

I don't have windows. I grabbed a PC at a yard sale, the condition was that the seller showed me it functioned, but wanted to keep the drive with OS. 
I wanted to get the machine to run Instant Cake and didn't need an OS. So, even if the process takes long, I'll let it run over night. The windows based suggestions make sense, but not for me. (The rest of my house is Mac OS)


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

JoeTaxpayer said:


> If I'm reading all this correctly, JMFS will work, just take a long time.
> 
> I don't have windows. I grabbed a PC at a yard sale, the condition was that the seller showed me it functioned, but wanted to keep the drive with OS.
> I wanted to get the machine to run Instant Cake and didn't need an OS. So, even if the process takes long, I'll let it run over night. The windows based suggestions make sense, but not for me. (The rest of my house is Mac OS)


Burn yourself a copy of the MFS Live cd v1.4, just 'cause it's handy to have if you own any hard drives.

Go back and read my post third from the top about using

dd_rescue

Also, now that you've taken been to the yard sale and taken that first step over to the dark side, make yourself a copy of the latest Parted Magic live cd.

You can use it to look at PC hard drives, or boot with no hard drive attached and still use it to surf the web and stuff.

Is that PC old enough to work with Instant Cake?


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

JoeTaxpayer said:


> If I'm reading all this correctly, JMFS will work, just take a long time.


To do what for you, exactly?



JoeTaxpayer said:


> I don't have windows. I grabbed a PC at a yard sale, the condition was that the seller showed me it functioned, but wanted to keep the drive with OS.
> I wanted to get the machine to run Instant Cake and didn't need an OS. So, even if the process takes long, I'll let it run over night. The windows based suggestions make sense, but not for me. (The rest of my house is Mac OS)


Is that PC old enough to work with Instant Cake?

What model(s) of TiVo are you trying to upgrade or bring back to life or whatever?

Unless something has changed very recently, there is no Instant Cake for anything newer than the Series 3 HD and HD XL, and jmfs doesn't offer anything in particular for anything older than the S3 HD.

Burn yourself a copy of the MFS Live cd v1.4, just 'cause it's handy to have if you own any hard drives.

Go back and read my post third from the top about using

dd_rescue

Also, now that you've taken been to the yard sale and taken that first step over to the dark side, make yourself a copy of the latest Parted Magic live cd.

You can use it to look at PC hard drives, or boot with no hard drive attached and still use it to surf the web and stuff.


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## FusionH3 (Aug 30, 2012)

I wanted to add an alternative method that I use primarily for backing up my Mac notebook. I'm adding this because I feel the discussion so far is excellent, and it seemed possible the contributors may not be aware of other common unix/linux tools they could use to improve their methods.

# Backup
dd if=/dev/hd0 bs=32768 conv=sync,noerror | gzip -c > /DiskCopy/hd0.gz

# Restore
gunzip -z /DiskCopy/hd0.gz | dd of=/dev/hd0 bs=32768

# Comments
"if=" is the Input File, or disk block device, as seen by Unix.
"of=" is the Output File, or path-to a non-existent file to-be-created.
"bs=" is the IO Block size to use, too small and compression is poor and the copy takes longer, too large and it also takes longer.
"|" piped to 
"gzip -c" creates a compressed output file, especially eliminating all of the null disk blocks. gzip/gunzip is a fairly ubiquitous *nix utility, as is "dd".
Your device path (ie /dev/hd0) will be different from the examples.

I ran in to issues with Mac hard disks that are similar in nature to Tivo. Primarily that my unique partitioning and format schema did not fit the more traditional tools that were available. Mac uses GPT, not MBR drive partitioning, and I had an extra partition for Windows dual-boot, that was not addressed by Mac backup tools. 

The main advantage to this technique beyong those already discussed for "backup" of a Tivo disk is that this is compressible, and the copy is kept as file, so not necessitating archival of an entire physical disk (although keeping archives spun down on a shelf may be safer). "dd_recover" can be substituted for "dd", and has some bad block handling features that are desirable. However, dd_recover does not have all of the same switches as dd, so some experimentation is needed and dd_recover is not available by default in all unix'es.

One can also expand on this method, by exploring the unix/linux device structure to discover the drive partitions or slices. You might have /dev/hd0s0, for example, as the first partition. It is possible to back up partitions separately and then restore them by laying down the drive partition table and individual partitions separately, which makes it possible to restore the backup on to a dis-similar disk (usually a bit larger).


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

FusionH3 said:


> I wanted to add an alternative method that I use primarily for backing up my Mac notebook. I'm adding this because I feel the discussion so far is excellent, and it seemed possible the contributors may not be aware of other common unix/linux tools they could use to improve their methods.
> 
> # Backup
> dd if=/dev/hd0 bs=32768 conv=sync,noerror | gzip -c > /DiskCopy/hd0.gz
> ...


Is

dd_recover

something of which I was previously unaware?

Or did you perhaps mean

dd_rescue

or

ddrescue

?


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