Dump and restore for Windows partitions

[Martin Boulianne]

On Jan 30, 2008 2:08 PM, Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 09:18:53AM -0500, Martin Boulianne wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Maybe this is a dumb question, but I was wondering if I could use
> > dump (and restore) on Windows NTFS partitions.
> >
> > Say I have a NTFS partition, ad0s1. Could I use:
> >    # dump -b 4 -f /backups/winxp.dump /dev/ad0s1
>
> Dump is only suited for FreeBSD's native UFS filesystem.
>
> > Or after a restore, Windows would be able to read the files? What about dd,
> > with something like:
> >    # dd if=/dev/ad0s1 of=/backups/winxp.bck bs=4k
>
> This should work, I think. But it will take up a lot of space, because
> it will copy the every sector (even unused ones).
>
> Unless there are special features of NTFS that you use, you could mount
> the volume, and make a backup with zip(1) or tar(1). Note that with this method
> you will probably lose any NTFS attributes.
>
> The port sysutils/ntfsprogs contains programs like ntfsclone and
> ntfscp. Maybe those can be of use?
>
> Probably the best tool to completely backup an NTFS partition is a
> windows-based tool.
>
> Roland
> --
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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>

Hi Roland,
Well, from its man pages, ntfsclone seems very promising!!
If it is restored to a different partition than the one it was backuped from,
Windows won't boot. But that's easy to fix...

Anyway it's for backup purpose, so I shall use it on the same partition.
Moreover, I use FreeBSD's boot manager, so I don't give a crap =P


Thanks! =)