On Mon, 2003-07-14 at 18:29, Dustin Puryear wrote: Actually, the user wants to do a backup of a partition image. He wants to zero it out so he can compress the size of the image. I highly second John's recommendation of partimage to solve this problem. I've used partimage on a knoppix CD to backup and restore a variety of filesystems. ONe big advantage of partimage over say, dd, for this is that it recognizes the filesystem types and thus image sizes are optimized accordingly without the need to manually zero out space, etc.
Note that this is true of NTFS partitions as well as ext(2,3), reiser, etc. for those who may be interested in such things :) http://www.scottharney.com/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2003/02/21#knoppix_and_partimage > At 11:10 AM 7/14/2003 -0500, you wrote: > > >This is just an idea, could you just do "cat /dev/zero > out.file" where > >out.file is on the drive you want filled? It will die when it runs out > >of space I think. > > That's not a bad idea! Another way to ensure you have a clean file system > is to backup, kill the file system, recreate it, and then restore. At that > point the file system is as clean as you will get it. Naturally, there is > more work involved in this method. > > > --- > Dustin Puryear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Puryear Information Technology, LLC <http://www.puryear-it.com> > Providing expertise in the management, integration, and > security of Windows and UNIX systems, networks, and applications. > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
