Backups of the root filesystems of chiara and nodus are underway right now. I am backing them up to the 1 TB LaCie external hard drives we recently acquired.

I first initialized the drives by hooking them up to my computer and running the setup.app file. After this, plugging the drive into the respective machine and running lsblk, I was able to see the mount point of the external drive. To actually initialize the backup, I ran the following command from a tmux session called ddBackupLaCie:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64K conv=noerror,sync

Here, /dev/sda is the disk with the root filesystem, and /dev/sdb is the external hard-drive. The installed version of dd is 8.13, and from version 8.21 onwards, there is a progress flag available, but I didn't want to go through the exercise of upgrading coreutils on multiple machines, so we just have to wait till the backup finishes.

We also wanted to do a backup of the root of FB1 - but I'm not sure if dd will work with the external hard drive, because I think it requires the backup disk size (for us, 1TB) to be >= origin disk size (which on FB1, according to df -h, is 2TB). Unsure why the root filesystem of FB is so big, I'm checking with Jamie what we expect it to be. Anyways we have also acquired 2TB HGST SATA drives, which I will use if the LaCie disks aren't an option.