Imaging Drives & Filesystems

• Imaging entire drives

  • Drive to drive
  • Drive to file
  • Drive to network files (dd -> netcat)
  • File images of drives are tricky to mount "loopback"

• Imaging partitions

  • File images of partitions can be mounted "loopback"
  • You lose partition table and boot records
  • It may not be reliable if partition table is lost
  • Different architectures have different partitioning

• Imaging file systems

  • Logical file backups - tar & cpio
  • Backup of filesystem structure - "backup"

Notes: