Is it a very bad idea to create disk image of mounted disk?

Posted by Maciek Sawicki on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Maciek Sawicki
Published on 2011-03-20T13:53:12Z Indexed on 2011/03/20 16:12 UTC
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Filed under:

hard-drive

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backup

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dd

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VDI

I would like to backup my server. For example using dd:

dd if=/dev/md0 of=/some_network_share

I wonder if this image will be vary inconsistent if /dev/md0 is mounted? Would it be possible to convert such dd image to vdi drive and create working virtual machine? Using this command for example:

VBoxManage convertfromraw ImageFile.dd OutputFile.vdi

Network traffic is disabled on firewall (there is only connection to/from one remote machine where image is copied).

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