lvm and dd

[Stefan Farrelly]

Dragan is correct, you dont need to use a miserly block size of 2k, thats for making tapes bootable! Using a blocksize of 1024k it took 25 minutes to make the backup copy (9Gb disk). The 2 disks were on the same bus though, if on separate bus'es that time should be halved or more.

Not only is this the simplest way to make an image backup but also the fastest.

[Alan Riggs]

The use of lifcp or dd to write the boot area of a disk will corrupt the PVRA and BDRA structures.

As mentioned above, you can swap the physical drive locations to boot cleanly off of the "copy". IF you have hot swappable drives this might not be an issue for you. Personally, I dislike solutions that require physical access to devices for implementation. An emergency root disk created with LVM can be booted from simply by specifying the path with setboot. I find this to be a more robust (and remotely available) solution. I also find it is easier to talk a remote operator through repointing a boot path (in the event of a hard crash recovery need) than to talk them through a disk swap.

YMMV, of course.