Re: [PLUG] Image-based partial backup?

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 12:23 AM, Bill Patterson <patterson@computer.org> wrote:
> I've had some fun with Clonezilla in the past couple of years and thought it
> worked well.  I'm not sure what it gives in file level specifics, but to
> that point, I'd want to be very sure that no files the OS needed were
> zeroed.
>

I've been using Clonezilla for years as well.  It works great.
However, it has no file exclusion features other than removing windows
swap files, and the function to remove a swap file does it by mounting
the drive read-write, deleting the swap file, unmounting it, and then
triggering the normal backup routine.  That isn't exactly something
that is easily extendable for general use.

The way it works is by creating a map of used/unused clusters on the
disk, and then imaging all the used clusters.  If you restore that
image you would end up with a disk where all the used clusters are
identical to the original, and all the unused clusters are either zero
or they contain whatever was on the disk before you restored over it
(I'm not sure which it does offhand).

What I'd really like to do is tweak that map of used/unused clusters
and have it treat clusters exclusively used by the excluded files as
if they were unused.  That would mean that a restored disk would just
contain junk in those files, and I could delete them after
restoration.  However, since those clusters were never stored, the
image would be that much smaller.

My intent is to use this for large stuff which is trivially re-installed.

--
Rich
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