Re: [gentoo-user] NVM on Gentoo Linux?

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 10:14 AM Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> On Sunday, 31 March 2019 12:32:55 BST Andreas Fink wrote:
> > On Sun, 31 Mar 2019 11:53:19 +0100
> >
> > Wols Lists <antlists@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> > > If I'm booting off a live-CD or similar, then I'm not worried about the
> > > system being available for use, and streaming the data at a level BELOW
> > > the file system is far more efficient and quicker.
> >
> > It's only faster if your disk is almost fully used. If you have a lot of
> > free disk space your method is doing a dumb clone of unused space. So it's
> > argueable which method is faster ;)
> > Your method neither allows changing of partition sizes nor a change on the
> > underlying filesystems. Maybe it's worth thinking about about another
> > filesystem, when you switch from classic HDD to SSD.
> >
> > Cheers
> > Andreas
>
> partclone is a more intelligent solution than dd, skipping any free disk space
> to clone a complete disk, or if required individual partitions.  Unlike rsync
> it will copy over partition boot records thus retaining UUIDs, which means
> MSWindows should be able to boot again without needing to use BCDedit et al.
>

There is also clonezilla, which features bootable images and is
basically a GUI wrapper around a bunch of FOSS partition imaging/etc
tools.  I believe that it can resize partitions and so on, at least
for the linux-oriented ones.  I'm not sure if it can resize NTFS.  I
think it uses partimage (which I'm guessing is related to partclone),
which uses free-space mapping combined with block-level backups.  That
makes it good for backing up filesystems where full drivers are not
available - as long as the software can figure out which blocks are
discardable it can do a block-level backup efficiently without the
need to completely decipher the filesystem layout.

-- 
Rich