Re: [gentoo-user] Ghosting a Ext3 partition

[Matthias Bethke <matthias@towiski.de>]

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Hi Mark,
on Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 05:39:12PM +1300, you wrote:
>> {"Ghost" functionality]
>>   
> I actually think that 'dump' will do what you want... provided you can 
> choose a time when the machine is not busy (should be easy if it's your 
> desktop!). You have to do 1 dump per filesystem, but many desktop 
> installations only consist of / (+ maybe /boot) anyway. Also dump of a 80Gb 
> system that only uses 5Gb will produce a 5Gb image.... Also it can do 
> incremental an cumulative backups.
>
> Some friends of mine use Amanda to backup their (Redhat/Centos) servers, 
> that may worth looking at too.

Amanda is very versatile but it can be a bitch to configure and is IMHO
only really worth it for larger installations with at least more than
one machine and preferably a backup server. But it can also use dump(1)
internally. I didn't really follow the thread but it seems dump has a
problem with busy file systems? I used amanda with dump on several
machines for a few years and never had any so it should be fine for a
desktop.
One method I used for getting the image size down (but which is no good
on a live system) was to use "dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy bs=1M" to quicky
write a file of zeroes that would fill up all free blocks, then dd the
whole partition through gzip that would just compress away the free
blocks. Works fine for install images but only when the disk is not
mounted r/w during imaging.

cheers,
	Matthias
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