Imaging mounted disk volumes under duress (2021)

I know TheFineArticle is in Linux land but for Windows people with this issue you might look at Sysinternals Disk2vhd.[0]<p>It can be run from the online OS itself and it can store the resulting vhd on the same disk it is imaging (with space and disk performance constraints).<p>I find it handy for turning my freshly superceded gaming machine into a VM on my new machine for easy access to files, before doing whatever with my old hardware.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;sysinternals&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;disk2vhd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;learn.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;sysinternals&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;dis...</a>

Since the year 2007, my working assumption is that if data is not on ZFS on physically redundant media that the data has not been successfully saved. And, any machines that don&#x27;t have ZFS (some RedHat based boxes) should be configured only through Ansible and configured with the intention that all data (including syslogs) is either forwarded somewhere that does have ZFS or is accessed via NFS (backed by ZFS).<p>Or Ceph Bluestore, which does checksums on physically redundant media. We do N+3 replication because we&#x27;re lazy.

FYI, while these block level methods do have a use case, parallel rsync and other file level tools are far safer and often faster with less additional load on the disk.<p>Duplicating the OS&#x2F;FS behavior hits the decidable problem and you just hope for the best with block level, often you won&#x27;t notice corruption either.