Re: [gentoo-user] Re: How can I rewrite all empty sectors with zeros?

[Simon <turner25@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@gmail.com>wrote:

> On 22/07/12 20:18, Jarry wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> I want to backup my whole hard-drive (8 partitions) with:
>> # dd if=/dev/sda | gzip > /path/image.gz
>>
>> In order to achieve good compression level I'd like to wipe
>> out all empty space with zeros. How can I do that?
>>
>
> That's the wrong way to do it.  You should use a tool that only copies the
> data, and then also backup the partition table.
>
> Or use partimage/clonezilla like Neil mentioned which does all that
> automatically.
>

For my part, I found compressing all files using squashfs to be most
useful, specially for backups as restoring single files vs all files is
just as simple.
Also, using the squashfs archive as read-only base of a unioned mount
(aufs, unionfs) is also a very useful trick.

As my systems are all setup the same, I never backup the partition table
and recreate it each time (easy, and I often change the partition layout
anyway).

Simon

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