Making HDD backup in sun Solaris system

UNIX Solaris
1

Hello to all,

I have Fujitsu Celzius M470 workstation which has Sun solaris system installed and want to make a complete backup of the hard drive. The existing HDD is SATA II, 500 GB.

I don't have much experience working with SUN solaris systems (not at all) but have some experience with linux systems. I plan to add another HDD and to use dd command to make exact copy of the hard drive.
Natural steps would be to add new HDD as second drive in the system, format it somehow and then use dd command.

I did the following on linux machines:

  1. I take new HDD with raw file system and connect it to the system.
  2. Start the computer and perform the format of the HDD
  3. Use dd command to make backup # dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

This way I have exact HDD (bootable) to be used as backup in case my original HDD fail.

Can someone explain me the steps in Sun solaris? I'm sure I'll use teh sam dd command but detecting and formatting the hard drive is abit tricky to me. Do I need to use console, or?

Thank you

2

Depending on the version of Solaris you are using, check out the documentation first:

Oracle Solaris 10 1/13 Information Library Updated: 2013-09-17

Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library Updated: 2014-02-06

3

I don't think you need to format drive for dd, unless you want to check it for badblocks. might be a good idea to fill unused space with zeroes first.
tar is also a nice option, as the backup is smaller and it gets defragmented on restore. but you need to create filesystem manually.

4

dd is a sector copy utility. It would be a waste of time to format the new disk prior to issuing the dd command unless you simply wanted to do a crude check for bad blocks.

BTW, generally not a good idea to use dd to make a copy of a live disk as you are proposing to do.

5

I'd presume the same goes for Linux filesystems.

6

Thank you for the replies.

First of all, I have determined the actual version of the solaris system under /etc/release.
It is:
Solaris 10 10/09 s10x_u86wo2_08a X86

When you say that it is generally not a good idea, what would you recommend? Please keep in mind that I have no installation disks and data and applications are valuable to me. The best option for me is to have exact copy of the HDD so in case HDD fails I'll have the working system in no time.
Like I said, I have no solaris installation disks nor the installation of actual application we're working with.
I'm totally new to Solaris, but since it's unix based it was my idea to try with dd command.

Is there an alternative but reliable way?

Thank you

P.S. I just want to add that before I had one machine with SCSI drives and SCSI adapter had another output so I could use DAT tape to make backup.

I used tar cv 'ls -1' command. Here I cannot use this way because there is no way to connect DAT tape device.