Re: [PLUG] Image-based partial backup?

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

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 9:15 AM, Keith C. Perry
<kperry@daotechnologies.com> wrote:
>
> I would be asking the opposite question to Eric- does it really have
> to be a file based solution?  You mentioned that you were looking
> for something offline so that would exclude most native Linux apps.
> ntfsclone from ntfsprogs however is exactly designed for that.  It
> understands the filesystem and is very efficient in storing it.  Even
> in Linux, most file backups are inefficient when is comes to storing
> sparse files and ntfs is no exception in that regard.  That may or may
> not be an issue with your workloads but it is something to be aware
> of.

I looked at ntfsclone, but it does not contain any options for excluding files.

>
> With this approach you could clone the file filesystem to a file- even
> run it through some compression.  When restoring it, you could delete
> what you don't need or want.

The problem with this is that you aren't actually excluding the files,
so they still consume space.  After I restore the image I actually
expect to go re-install all the stuff I'm excluding.  It is just easy
enough to do that I don't want to eat up hundreds of GB of space in
the backup image for little gain.

>
> If you want to be able to use this to rebuild a bootable system you
> can also grab the boot sectors with "dd".  Up until windows 2008 I
> used this (or just images with created with dd) to be able to rebuild
> my windows boxes.  2008 has a very good and native snapshot facility
> so I no longer do this except for some virtualization projects.

I was actually tempted to take a look at the Windows 7 backup program.
I couldn't really find much info on how effective it actually is.

Does it actually work?

Rich
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