Using SFDISK to backup your partition table
Many times we perform full backups of the root partition (/), including all mount points under root. How often do we back up our partition tables? What if we have total disk failure and our only restore option is a file-level restore? Will we know what our partition sizes were? Enter sfdisk.
Using SFDISK
The most common usage of sfdisk is to dump the partition sizes and count to a file for later import. This partition table dump can be included in your gzipped tarball.
Use this command to dump /dev/sda’s partition table:
# sfdisk -d /dev/sda > /backup/sda.part
The dump file will look like this:
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors
/dev/sda1 : start= 63, size=479990007, Id=83, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start=479990070, size= 8385930, Id=82
/dev/sda3 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
/dev/sda4 : start= 0, size= 0, Id= 0
Restoring Partitions from SFDISK Dump
To restore your partition table from a dump file use this command:
# sfdisk /dev/sda < sda.part