image creating (simple backup)

[JoeB]

>From the archives


The question of using the Norton Ghost program to make an single
flat
image file of an hard drives partition containing FBSD has been
asked
many times on this list. UP until now the answer has all ways been
that
the benefits of using Ghost on a MS/win partition can not be
achieved
when used on a FBSD slice because the ghost created image file
contains all the unused space as well as the used space.

Jacob S. Barrett had the idea of zeroing out the unused space before
running ghost so ghost will compress all the zero filled space
resulting in an image file size and elapse run time comparable to
what
you would achieve on a MS/win partition. This is a great work
around.



Before running the Ghost program from native booted ms/dos you have
to run this command on FBSD before shutting FBSD down.


dd if=/dev/zero of=filler bs=1m ; rm filler


Below is the original thread



> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.ORG
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Dan
Nelson
> Sent: Friday, October 04, 2002 10:33 AM
> To: Jacob S. Barrett
> Cc: freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Re: Block Zeroing Tool
>
> In the last episode (Oct 04), Jacob S. Barrett said:
>
>>Is there a tool for FreeBSD that zeros the unallocated blocks on a
>>filesystem?
>>
>>The company I work for has an image on demand system for our lab
>>machines.  This system relies on ghost which only supports file by
>>file imaging on certain file systems.  I want to take disk images
of
>>certain FreeBSD installations.  Ghost will only take sector by
sector
>>images of FreeBSD partitions.  Since it is doing this it stores
all
>>the "junk" unused blocks as well.  This makes for a very large
image
>>even with high compression.  If I can zero out the unused blocks
>>before taking the image with high compression the image size
should
>>be much smaller.
>>
>>So, is there utility to zero out those blocks?  Does this make
sense?
>>Is there a better way to take images of FreeBSD machines?

>
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=filler bs=1m ; rm filler
>
>
>
> I also have tried to use ghost to make image backups of FBSD,
> but the image is the same size as the FBSD slice.
> Have you tested the solution posted above to zero out the unused
> disk space in the FBSD slice so ghost will only image bkup real
data?
> Did it work like you hoped?
>

Yes I have tested it,  and it works great.  Be sure to turn
compression
on to high to get the best results.  Here is what I saw after
zeroing
the unallocated blocks using the dd command.

FreeBSD partition size: 11G
Allocated space: 6G
Ghost image size: 3.4G

Before zeroing out the images on this box were between 8-9G.
Needless
to say our IT guy is much happier that my box isn't chewing up 9G
per
image on the system anymore.  And I am happy that imaging this
machine
only takes an hour now rather than 4.

-Jake

--
Jacob S. Barrett
jbarrett at amduat.net
www.amduat.net

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Hilmi
Hilmiev
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2003 11:35 AM
To: freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: image creating (simple backup)

Dear All,

I would like to make a image from one of my HDD. The FreeBSD box
work
now with FreeBSD 4.7. Is a possible ot create image via Symantec
Ghost
or PQ Drive Image? Or have other way for image creating?

Best regards,

Hilmi

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