Backing up to smaller drive

Posted by Dave on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Dave
Published on 2010-05-24T07:52:49Z Indexed on 2010/05/24 8:02 UTC
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linux

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backup

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clone

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dd

In a few hours I'll have a new 500GB Sony laptop, filled with the usual Sony rubbish which I'll promptly be replacing with Ubuntu or Crunchbang or something. However, first I want to make a full clone of the drive (including recovery partitions), should I wish to return it to Sony or sell it on in its factory state.

The problem is that the only backup drives I have are less than 500GB - the biggest I have is 250GB or so! So I need to backup and compress on-the-fly.

What's the best way to do this? Presumably dd piped into gzip would do the trick, or does anyone have any other suggestions to accomplish this?

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