"James Barlow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > unattended philosophy. Note this is for a disaster recovery > scenario, not multiple installs (Repeat the mantra - Imaging > Bad. Unattended Good)
Testify! > Currently I'm using a modification of the Unattended PXE boot to map > to a network share containing a copy of the dos version of Norton > Ghost, and make an image of the partition to a compressed > file. I have used this technique as well. Ghost is a good product, as is PowerQuest's DriveImage. > Being a cheap skate however, I'd like to save the 50 quid and do it > will free tools. In the past, I have used a Linux rescue disk and dd + gzip (or bzip2). The dd+gzip option is not all that bad; the key is to create a massive (in your example, 8G or so) file containing all zeroes and then delete it. This wipes the free blocks on the disk with zeroes, which lets them compress very, very well. > One feature of Ghost that I can't seem to find in other products is > that if you image a 10Gb partition containing only 2Gb of data, you > can end up with a compressed file of around 1Gb, rather than a > bit-for-bit copy of the whole 10Gb. The limitations of dd+gzip are twofold. One is the problem you describe. The other is that the image will have exactly the same size when it is restored. Which means you cannot restore onto a smaller partition, and if you restore onto a larger one you will waste the extra space. To get around these limitations, you need a tool which understands the NTFS file system. The commercial products do this, which actually makes them worth the price, IMO. The only free tool I can find with any kind of support for this is <http://www.partimage.org/>. - Pat ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by: ApacheCon 2003, 16-19 November in Las Vegas. Learn firsthand the latest developments in Apache, PHP, Perl, XML, Java, MySQL, WebDAV, and more! http://www.apachecon.com/ _______________________________________________ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
