[PLUG] Imaging CF card...

[Russell Senior]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 10:19 AM Rodney W. Grimes <freebsd at gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>
wrote:

> > > Ditto what Tomas said. For looking at it locally, dd'ing the partition
> > > (/dev/sdb1) is fine, but to make a full backup of the CF card so that
> you
> > > can reproduce it, you want an image of /dev/sdb as well.
> >
> > That assumes the size of the CF card is the same. I would use fdisk to
> > partition it and then write the image to sdb1.
>
> I would not write an image, but would rather fdisk and format
> the new empty msdos partition, then use mount(s) and tar to
> copy the contents.
>
> Imaging msdos file systems to changed partition parameters is
> frought with bad issues.
>
>
If the new media is the same size or bigger, dd'ing the image will work
fine (you just won't use any more space). It has the advantage of being
able to restore an exact copy. If I was screwing around with ancient media,
I would definitely save a full device image and never modify it. You can
always modify a copy.