Re: [PLUG] Image-based partial backup?

["Keith C. Perry" <kperry@daotechnologies.com>]

How compressible is that 300Gb though?  I generally use lzo compression but if times isn't a factor you might be some surprisingly good results with gzip or bzip2.

I don't think that facility is in Windows 7.  I wish it was because 2008 Server is almost as easy to move around as my Linux xfs volumes.

I started pushing more for clients to virtualize Windows 7.  I seem to remember having some sort issue with the window procedures after I imaged in 7 that I did not have in XP.  I started winding down my bare mental support of Windows at that point.  With the idiodicy of NOT providing media Windows 7 became to much of a p.i.t.a. for me to want to deal with when I could virtualize it and be done.  That's NOT going to be an option for most people so what I've been is keeping at least one old style image for critical systems and then boot sectors and ntfsclone files for each type of client system.  Disk is cheap(er?), my headaches are not :)


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 
Keith C. Perry, MS E.E. 
Owner, DAO Technologies LLC 
(O) +1.215.525.4165 x2033 
(M) +1.215.432.5167 
www.daotechnologies.com 

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rich Freeman" <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>
To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 30, 2014 9:41:48 AM
Subject: Re: [PLUG] Image-based partial backup?

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
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug