[OT] System Imaging

[J. Epperson]

On Tue, March 27, 2007 10:06, Scott_Purcell at Dell.com wrote:
> Another to consider is http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/.  Funny, I
> stumbled on this just last night and noted it. Haven't tried it, but it
> looks like it has potential.  The site describes a number of advantages
> (at least as perceived by the authors) it has over some of the other
> tools discussed in this thread.
>

Yes, that does look good from a scaling standpoint because of the "used
blocks only" approach.  I like g4l because it is so utterly simple, just a
dd piped through an lzop.  In fact, when I do an image personally these
days, I don't even use g4l.  I just NFS export the image directory, boot
the target machine with a live CD like Knoppix, then
mount server:/home/install/img /mnt;dd if=/dev/hda|lzop|dd
of=/home/install/img/image.lzop

Such an image can be restored with g4l or a similar command line.

If you binary-zero-fill the free space on the target before shutting it
down, you'll approach the performance of a "used blocks only" solution.