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Hi Mark, |
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on Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 05:39:12PM +1300, you wrote: |
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>> {"Ghost" functionality] |
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>> |
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> I actually think that 'dump' will do what you want... provided you can |
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> choose a time when the machine is not busy (should be easy if it's your |
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> desktop!). You have to do 1 dump per filesystem, but many desktop |
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> installations only consist of / (+ maybe /boot) anyway. Also dump of a 80Gb |
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> system that only uses 5Gb will produce a 5Gb image.... Also it can do |
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> incremental an cumulative backups. |
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> |
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> Some friends of mine use Amanda to backup their (Redhat/Centos) servers, |
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> that may worth looking at too. |
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|
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Amanda is very versatile but it can be a bitch to configure and is IMHO |
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only really worth it for larger installations with at least more than |
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one machine and preferably a backup server. But it can also use dump(1) |
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internally. I didn't really follow the thread but it seems dump has a |
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problem with busy file systems? I used amanda with dump on several |
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machines for a few years and never had any so it should be fine for a |
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desktop. |
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One method I used for getting the image size down (but which is no good |
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on a live system) was to use "dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy bs=1M" to quicky |
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write a file of zeroes that would fill up all free blocks, then dd the |
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whole partition through gzip that would just compress away the free |
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blocks. Works fine for install images but only when the disk is not |
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mounted r/w during imaging. |
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|
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cheers, |
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Matthias |
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-- |
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I prefer encrypted and signed messages. KeyID: FAC37665 |
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Fingerprint: 8C16 3F0A A6FC DF0D 19B0 8DEF 48D9 1700 FAC3 7665 |
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