Clone FreePBX disk sda to sdb by DD command

[charneval (andrea carnevali)]

Hi.
I would like copy my full installation to an external disk by the command dd.
I used this command

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 conv=notrunc,noerror

but when I check the partition table I saw this configuration:

[root@freepbx ~]# lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 111.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 2G 0 part /boot
└─sda2 8:2 0 109.9G 0 part
├─SangomaVG-root 253:0 0 100.8G 0 lvm /
└─SangomaVG-swaplv1 253:1 0 3.8G 0 lvm [SWAP]
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 2G 0 part
└─sdb2 8:18 0 109.9G 0 part
[root@freepbx ~]#

Do you think is ok?

I work in this freePBX connected by a VPN and I will do a clone of the original disk.

Thanks
Andrea

[gbaughma (Greg)]

dd does a block-by-block copy. That being said, your losing a lot of space on your second drive, because dd doesn’t resize partitions.

The sdb should work, but it will be seen as the same size (111gb) as the original, instead of the 465.8gb of the duplicate.

If you pull sdb out to put into another machine, you may also need to make it bootable.

You can also dd out to a FILE, instead of a device, which would give you essentially an image of sda, which could be dd’d back to sda if necessary. It wouldn’t be a bootable drive, but it would be an image.

[charneval (andrea carnevali)]

Thanks.
In the next days I will do some test with dd out to a file .img

Then I’ll update the issue in the forum.

Andrea