Clone your systems full disk drive at the block level unlike our File Backup which backups up at the file level.
This creates a full clone of a hardrive, including all partitions.
Use dd to clone a disk, offsite.
This backup recipe is in Alpha, Learn more about Alpha and Beta recipes stages
Clone your systems full disk drive at the block level unlike our File Backup which backups up at the file level.
This creates a full clone of a hardrive, including all partitions.
Warning - this is a live mount and the integriy of the backup will depend on server activity.
Due to this reason this backup if offered in Alpha. Ideally DD should only be used on a read only or unmounted drive. dd will copy at the block level of the device so if I file is removed, you could end up with half a file on the device. For some things this would be okay, depending on use case.
Due to being a full device copy, the backup is much faster than a file based backup. We found that a 25gb DigitalOcean droplet with 15gb used will backup in 9 minutes. Compared to a file backup of the same server taking x minutes.
Full dumps will not be space efficient, and can be hard to compress, everything on the device is copied and with compression only parts of the device can be compressed. A fresh server will be smaller and as the drive is more used its harder and harder to compress.
Due to the nature of a recovery process, you can't do it from a live mounted device, so we don't offer automatic recovery.
Tested at DigitalOcean:
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shutdown -h now