{"id":12711,"date":"2019-03-28T14:17:37","date_gmt":"2019-03-28T14:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/?p=12711"},"modified":"2019-03-28T14:17:37","modified_gmt":"2019-03-28T14:17:37","slug":"how-to-backup-or-clone-linux-partitions-using-cat-command","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2019\/03\/28\/how-to-backup-or-clone-linux-partitions-using-cat-command\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Backup or Clone Linux Partitions Using \u2018cat\u2019 Command"},"content":{"rendered":"

A rough utilization of Linux\u00a0cat command<\/a>\u00a0would be to make a full disk backup or a disk partition backup or cloning of a disk partition by redirecting the command output against the partition of a hard disk, or USB stick or a local image file or write the output to a network socket.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Linux<\/a><\/p>\n

Linux Filesystem Backup Using \u2018cat\u2019 Command<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It absolutely normal of you to think of why we should use\u00a0cat<\/strong>\u00a0over\u00a0dd<\/strong>\u00a0when the latter does the same job easily, which is quite right, however, I recently realized that cat is much faster than\u00a0dd<\/strong>\u00a0when its comes to speed and performance.<\/p>\n

I do agree that\u00a0dd<\/strong>\u00a0provides, even more, options and also very useful in dealing with large backups such as tape drives (How to Clone Linux Partitions Using \u2018dd\u2019 Command<\/a>), whereas cat includes lesser option and it\u2019s not necessarily a worthy\u00a0dd<\/strong>\u00a0replacement but still, remains an option wherever applicable.<\/p>\n

Suggested Read:<\/b>\u00a0How to Clone or Backup Linux Disk Using Clonezilla<\/a><\/p>\n

Trust me, it gets the job done quite successfully in copying the content of a partition to a new unformatted partition. The only requirements would be to provide a valid hard disk partition with the minimum size of the existing data and with no filesystem whatsoever.<\/p>\n

In the below example the first partition on the first hard disk, which corresponds to the\u00a0\/boot<\/code>\u00a0partition i.e.\u00a0\/dev\/sda1<\/code>, is cloned onto the first partition of the second disk (i.e.\u00a0\/dev\/sdb1<\/code>) using the Linux redirection operator.<\/p>\n

# cat \/dev\/sda1 > \/dev\/sdb1\r\n<\/pre>\n
\n
\"Full<\/a><\/p>\n
Full Disk Partition Backup in Linux<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
After the command finishes, the cloned partition is mounted to\u00a0\/mnt<\/code>\u00a0and both mount points directories are listed to check if any files are missing.<\/p>\n
# mount \/dev\/sdb1 \/mnt\r\n# ls \/mnt\r\n# ls \/boot\r\n<\/pre>\n
\n
\"Verify<\/a><\/p>\n
Verify Cloned Partition Files<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In order to extend the partition file system to the maximum size issue the following command with root privileges.<\/p>\n
Suggested Read:<\/b>\u00a014 Outstanding Backup Utilities for Linux Systems<\/a><\/p>\n
$ sudo resize2fs \/dev\/sdb1\r\n<\/pre>\n
\n
\"Resize<\/a><\/p>\n
Resize or Extend Partition Size in Linux<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The\u00a0cat<\/code>\u00a0command is an excellent tool to\u00a0manipulate text files in Linux<\/a>\u00a0and some special multimedia files, but should be avoided for binary data files or concatenate shebang files. For all other options don\u2019t hesitate to execute\u00a0man cat<\/code>\u00a0from console.<\/p>\n
$ man cat\r\n<\/pre>\n
Surprisingly, there is another command called\u00a0tac,<\/strong>\u00a0yes, I am talking about\u00a0tac<\/strong>, which is a reverse version of\u00a0cat<\/strong>command (also spelled backwards) which display each line of a file in reverse order, want to know more about\u00a0tac<\/strong>, read\u00a0How to Use Tac Command in Linux.<\/a><\/p>\n
Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A rough utilization of Linux\u00a0cat command\u00a0would be to make a full disk backup or a disk partition backup or cloning of a disk partition by redirecting the command output against the partition of a hard disk, or USB stick or a local image file or write the output to a network socket. Linux Filesystem Backup … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “How to Backup or Clone Linux Partitions Using \u2018cat\u2019 Command”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12712,"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12711\/revisions\/12712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}