# dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/home/username/partition2.img bs=4096 Playing with the bs value can have an impact on the overall speed of a dd operation, although the ideal setting will depend on your hardware profile and other considerations. The next example does that and also uses bs to set the number of bytes to copy at a single time (4,096, in this case). You could also focus on a single partition from a drive. Those commands created images of entire drives.
img archive of the /dev/ sda drive and save it to the home directory of your user account: # dd if=/dev/sda of=/home/username/sdadisk.img The syntax is simple: if= defines the source drive and of= defines the file or location where you want your data saved: # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb You've plugged in an empty drive (ideally having the same capacity as your /dev/ sda system). Suppose you want to create an exact image of an entire disk of data that's been designated as /dev/ sda. Now that you've been suitably warned, we'll start with something straightforward. Remember: Before pressing that Enter key to invoke dd, pause and think very carefully! Basic dd operations But before you start flinging partitions from one end of the earth to the other, I should mention that there's some truth to that old Unix admin joke: " dd stands for disk destroyer." If you type even one wrong character in a dd command, you can instantly and permanently wipe out an entire drive of valuable data. Using dd, on the other hand, can make perfect byte-for-byte images of, well, just about anything digital. But, because those filesystem archives aren't complete images, they'll require a running host OS at both ends to serve as a base.
You can, of course, use tar or even scp to replicate entire filesystems by copying the files from one computer and then pasting them as-is on top of a fresh Linux install onĀ another computer. There's all kinds of stuff you can do with dd if you research hard enough, but where it shines is in the ways it lets you play with partitions. Free online course: RHEL Technical Overview.
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