[gentoo-user] Re: Ghosting a Ext3 partition

[Michael Schmarck]

Jonathan Haws <Jonathan.Haws@×××××××.edu> wrote:

> On Sunday March 2 2008 16:43, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>> Right - what you intend the backup to protect against drives all this
>> sort of stuff.
>
> The thing that is driving my backups is a hard disk failure.

Of course :)

> Hence I was
> using Ghost instead of something else so I can backup the entire drive and
> not just a single partition.  That enables the quickest recovery of the
> entire system in the event of a failure.

Depends. If you'd just store tar files, you'd just have to create the
filesystem beforehand and then restore the tar files. Won't take much
longer than restoring a Ghost image, I'd suppose.

> I have looked everywhere I can think of to find a tool that is similar to
> Ghost that will backup the entire hard drive to an image that I can put to
> DVD, without including free blocks on the disk (I don't want an 80GB image
> of
> an 80GB drive when only 5GB are in use at the time).

That's why I'd rather use tar... An additional benefit is, that tar
is *MUCH* simpler than Ghost (or partimage). Because of that, you could
use your tar file in many more applications (for example if you want
to have a look at what the file was at your last backup).

> Does anyone know of
> a tool capable of this that runs on Linux and has FULL Linux fs support?

partimage.

Michael

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