Disk imaging program?
John Hupp
ubuntu at prpcompany.com
Thu Jun 26 16:11:51 UTC 2014
Zerofree vs. secure-delete (which includes sfill):
Both are in the standard repos.
Zerofree is documented to work on ext2, 3 and 4, while sfill allegedly
will work with any mounted filesystem (including NTFS? I have not seen
that stated, but that would be a distinct advantage).
Various posts, however, note that the secure-delete home page seems to
have vanished, while zerofree has an existing home page at
http://intgat.tigress.co.uk/rmy/uml/index.html, apparently last updated
in August 2012.
(And just to add an option/confusion, there is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zerofill/ which is under active
development and described as "Based on sfill from secure-delete by van
Hauser / [THC], vh at thc.org, <http://www.thc.org>, simplified and with a
few fixes added." Zerofill is not, however, in the standard repositories.)
But let's say that, one way or another, there is a good solution in one
or more of the above for zero-filling the free space.
----------------------------------
e2image only saves the filesystem's metadata, not the actual data. It
is a disaster recovery helper:
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man8/e2image.8.html
----------------------------------
Concerning the two questions that I posted about last:
1) If as you suspect, during a restore, I cannot boot a *buntu Live
disc, then remove it just before running a dd restoration command (so
that the first image DVD can be inserted, ready for dd to find), then I
would not be able to create a DVD emergency-recovery/factory-restore
set. I see that I did not explicitly state this as a goal in my first
post, but that is the underlying purpose of the whole exercise. A DVD
set is the cheapest thing to give away with a computer.
Does anyone know of another distro or rescue disc that supports this?
DD is probably everywhere, so maybe just finding the right distro/live
disc will solve this first issue.
2) But if dd cannot be supported to work with the split-up image on
multiple DVD's, but the splits would first have to be concatenated and
placed, say, on an external hard drive, then again that defeats my
purpose of creating a DVD emergency-recovery/factory-restore set. If an
external hard drive were part of the equation, I would just use
Clonezilla and have a simple solution.
It seems that most of the pieces to a (laborious) solution are here.
But in the end, does dd fall a bit short for my purpose?
If so, then I'm back to asking my original question about whether there
is a free disk imaging program that supports/offers:
__ imaging of Windows and Linux partitions in a single image-the-disk
operation that includes the boot sector and related structures
__ bootable disc can do offline image backup and restore
__ image to spanned DVD's
__ good compression
__ free for business as well as personal use
__ *and I add this clarification: all for the purpose of creating a DVD
emergency-recovery/factory-restore set that could rebuild on a
replacement hard drive or overwrite a corrupted installation
On 6/25/2014 7:19 PM, Niles Rogoff wrote:
> Just did some research, instead of zerofree (which actually does work
> on ext4 I think) you should look into sfill, and if you backup using
> e2image you wouldn't need to run either
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 7:16 PM, Niles Rogoff <nilesrogoff at gmail.com
> <mailto:nilesrogoff at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I was under the impression that zerofree only worked with ext2/3
>
> 1) Don't know, but probably not. You can always boot from a flash
> drive or use a live operating system
> 2) No, ideally you would recover all of your split files,
> concatenate them into one, gunzip it then restore from it
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 5:56 PM, John Hupp <ubuntu at prpcompany.com
> <mailto:ubuntu at prpcompany.com>> wrote:
>
> On 6/25/2014 3:36 PM, Niles Rogoff wrote:
>> >tar would be unable to correctly save the permissions on
>> those files
>>
>> I should clarify that this only applies to NTFS partitions.
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 3:35 PM, Niles Rogoff
>> <nilesrogoff at gmail.com <mailto:nilesrogoff at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> He's saying if you, instead of copying sector by sector,
>> decided put all the files into a tar file, then tar would
>> be unable to correctly save the permissions on those files.
>>
>> This would be in place of dd, and would not be able to
>> copy the boot sector of a device or partition
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 2:04 PM, John Hupp
>> <ubuntu at prpcompany.com <mailto:ubuntu at prpcompany.com>> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/25/2014 1:12 PM, Nils Kassube wrote:
>>
>> John Hupp wrote:
>>
>> And point well taken: it does seem to me
>> that, as a refinement of the
>> initial suggested plan, gzip alone should
>> suffice since we are dealing
>> with a single-file output from dd and not a
>> collection of files.
>>
>> Well, you could use a command chain dd | gzip |
>> tar to split the output
>> for several DVDs including a prompt for the next
>> medium.
>>
>> BTW: If you want to save data only, you shouldn't
>> use tar for ntfs
>> partitions because tar doesn't know about the
>> ntfs permissions which
>> different from the Unix permissions.
>>
>>
>> Nils
>>
>>
>> Tar must do some processing of its source contents
>> then? The original suggestion for using dd in this
>> thread came from Niles Rogoff, and his prescription
>> was to use usplit. I don't know that this command is
>> native to Ubuntu, but I believe split is. And if
>> split merely does that, then it seems like ntfs or
>> unix permissions should be preserved. Agree?
>>
>> And I think I still have this question lingering:
>> Does dd knows how to prompt for the next DVD (the
>> next split) during a restore operation?
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
> I am currently thinking this procedure may work:
>
> Wipe Windows partition free space: D/L Sdelete from
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx,
> save to c:\windows\system32, and run:
> $ sdelete -z c:
>
> Wipe Linux partition free space: Boot *buntu Live disc,
> install zerofree, and run:
> $ zerofree -v /dev/sda5
>
> Then for an external hard drive mounted at
> /media/user/HD-PCTU2/laptop-image:
>
> $ cd /media/user/HD-PCTU2/laptop-image
> $ sudo -i
> # dd if=/dev/sda bs=64K | gzip -c -9 | split -b 4500M -
> drivebackup.img.gz
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> After that, I would have to manually burn the the various
> drivebackup.img.gz files to DVD.
>
> Apart from corrections/improvements to the above, I still have
> two questions:
> 1) For restore, if I boot a *buntu Live disc, just before
> running a dd restoration command, can I remove the *buntu disc
> and insert the first image DVD?
> 2) Does dd knows how to prompt for the next DVD (the next
> split) during a restore operation?
>
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>
>
>
>
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