Quote:
Originally Posted by
incredible
Thats why because of precautions, checks and measures to be taken, ufsdump is much faster, easier and safer.
I must disagree. ufsdump works only with ufs filesystems. ufsrestore will not render a disk bootable, copy the partition table, or deal with any slices not containing ufs filesystems. A lot of analysis is needed to clone a disk piecemeal. If you really find a single dd command more complex than prtvtoc, fmthard, installboot, and several invocations of ufsdump and and newfs and ufsrestore, ok, I will take you at your word. But what if you have this task to perform on an HP-UX system, a Solaris system, an SCO system, and a Linux system. Each of these these systems needs a cloned root disk and each may or may not be partitioned and the partitions may or may not contain the local equivalent of a McKusick filesystem. Now which is easier? The dd is conceptually very easy and does not depend on intimate knowledge of the particular unix flavor or disk layout. This makes it attractive to someone without a great deal of Solaris knowledge... such as a person who might post the question in the first place.
If the disk is dominated by mostly empty ufs filesystems and/or the swap slice, then your way probably will be faster for larger disks. But for a 72 GB or smaller disk, like you might find on an old V480, you will need to hustle to beat the dd.