Using dd and dd_rescue

Following up on a post about recovering bad disks and reiser file systems, here is a list of ddrescue commands to help make life that little bit easier:

Backup MBR (boot code + partition table):

dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr count=1 bs=512

Restore boot code + partition table:

dd if=mbr of=/dev/hda

Restore, not including partition table:

dd of=/dev/hda if=mbr bs=448 count=1

Saving partition sizes to text file:

fdisk -l /dev/hda >partition-info.txt

Backing up to gzipped file:

dd if=/dev/hda | gzip >hda.gz

Restoring:

gunzip -c hda.gz | dd of=/dev/hda

Backing up to archive split into 1GB chunks:

dd if=/dev/hda | split -b 1024m -d - hda.

Restoring:

cat hda.* | dd of=/dev/hda

Backing up over ssh tunnel to remote machine (blowfish = faster):

dd if=/dev/hda | ssh -c blowfish user@machine "dd of=hda"

copying files over ssh tunnel:

tar cv /source | ssh -c blowfish user@machine "cd /destination ; tar x"

Thanks to colinm over at Digg for putting these so succinctly

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