On 28-Feb-07, at 17:12 , Geoff Gigg wrote:
Have you considered the free ghost program? Hubert Feyrer's
NetBSD-based "g4u".
g4u works, but it is a rather ugly brute force "backup" method. Last
time I checked g4u essentially does this:
dd if=/dev/hda | gzip > hdimage.gz
It can take a while to create and restore the image. The image is not
portable to a different sized harddrive and sometimes different
manufacturers.
It does have its place, but for backups the other options discussed
are likely better. Even cp -R would be better.
If you do use g4u be sure to zeroize free space on all filesystems
first. A simple method is to create and delete a large file of zeros:
FOO=$( mktemp -p . )
dd if=/dev/zero of="$FOO"
rm "$FOO"
See the -p option in man mktemp to control the location of the temp
file.
See the bs option in man dd. I generally set bs=102400 for improved
speed.
--
sg