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Non-Windows Software / *NIX: Commands / software to verify partition backups / clones?
« on: January 16, 2015, 10:47 PM »
Am trying out a cloning dock -- one of those things that let's one clone a drive to another without the use of a PC.
Would like to verify the results though -- perhaps not every time.
I'm currently doing something like:
for N partitions and comparing with analogous results from the other drive.
I'm not that concerned about MBR / GPT metadata at the moment. (Thought of just doing the whole drive (e.g. /dev/sda) but then realized that drive sizes differ some times :))
Also tried the cksum command as perhaps that's good enough to detect errors. I/O is probably so much more of a bottleneck that may be there won't be a detectable difference...
Any favorites or recommendations for this sort of procedure?
Some numbers and additional details:
Cloning a c. 320 GB drive has taken around 80 min (have done this a couple of times now).
Verifying (i.e. using the md5sum program above on 4 partitions) I didn't track very closely, but it may have exceeded an hour total.
Three of the partitions contained ext4 filesystems and the fourth was swap -- yes, working with the swap partition was probably pointless :)
Would like to verify the results though -- perhaps not every time.
I'm currently doing something like:
md5sum /dev/sda1
...
md5sum /dev/sdaN
for N partitions and comparing with analogous results from the other drive.
I'm not that concerned about MBR / GPT metadata at the moment. (Thought of just doing the whole drive (e.g. /dev/sda) but then realized that drive sizes differ some times :))
Also tried the cksum command as perhaps that's good enough to detect errors. I/O is probably so much more of a bottleneck that may be there won't be a detectable difference...
Any favorites or recommendations for this sort of procedure?
Some numbers and additional details:
Cloning a c. 320 GB drive has taken around 80 min (have done this a couple of times now).
Verifying (i.e. using the md5sum program above on 4 partitions) I didn't track very closely, but it may have exceeded an hour total.
Three of the partitions contained ext4 filesystems and the fourth was swap -- yes, working with the swap partition was probably pointless :)