Disk cloning

[Dimitri Yioulos]

Hello to all.

I hope it's OK to ask the following:

I've been asked by a company to remotely clone a working system. It's colo'd in Virginia
(company HQ is in New York, I'm in Massachusetts).  Physical access to the box, a PE
2950, I believe, is via "Remote Hands" only - colo personnel can do minor things,
including disk swaps.  Down time is really not an option.

I've considered all of the various cloning tools, and it seems to me that dd and rsync
are best-suited to the task.  It looks like "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4096
conv=notrunc,noerror" will accomplish the cloning (sda and sdb are of the same make,
model, and size).

My questions:

1.  Is the above dd command correct?
2.  After cloning, must sdb be disconnected so as not to cause booting problems?
3.  Do I have to do anything post-cloning to make sdb bootable?
4.  What rsync command would I use to keep the two disks synced?

If anyone has gone through this process, and can provide guidance, I'd appreciate it.

TIA.

Dimitri

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