Following up on a post about recovering bad disks and reiser file systems, here is a list of ddrescue commands to help make life that little bit easier:
Backup MBR (boot code + partition table):
<code>dd if=/dev/hda of=mbr count=1 bs=512</code>
Restore boot code + partition table:
<code>dd if=mbr of=/dev/hda</code>
Restore, not including partition table:
<code>dd of=/dev/hda if=mbr bs=448 count=1</code>
Saving partition sizes to text file:
<code>fdisk -l /dev/hda >partition-info.txt</code>
Backing up to gzipped file:
<code>dd if=/dev/hda | gzip >hda.gz</code>
Restoring:
<code>gunzip -c hda.gz | dd of=/dev/hda</code>
Backing up to archive split into 1GB chunks:
<code>dd if=/dev/hda | split -b 1024m -d - hda.</code>
Restoring:
<code>cat hda.* | dd of=/dev/hda</code>
Backing up over ssh tunnel to remote machine (blowfish = faster):
<code>dd if=/dev/hda | ssh -c blowfish user@machine "dd of=hda"</code>
copying files over ssh tunnel:
<code>tar cv /source | ssh -c blowfish user@machine "cd /destination ; tar x"</code>
Thanks to colinm over at Digg for putting these so succinctly