Is there an explorer for the images?
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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Is there some tool which can help me traverse thru the contents of the saved images? Very much like ghost explorer.
It would be awesome to have an explorer and extractor built for these images. As the images get larger, its hard to restore full partition just for one file.
Sorry, due to the format of partimage and ntfsclone, there is no way to do this directly. However, if the image is saved by dd, yes, it can be done by mounting it.
Does 'dd' method out zeroes in the unused sectors for better compression?
Not really. dd dumps everything from the file system to an image file. You will find the image will be larger then that from ntfsclone/partimage. dd is the last choice, since it's not efficient.
I wonder why is it hard to do 'tar' or 'dar' kind of thing on the filesystems already known? Why did partimage go with different format? May be I don't understand the complexity of the things involved but I would tend to think that if we made a gzipped 'tar' backup of the partition of which the filesystem is a known type (i.e. we can mount it), it would be sufficient to restore it by mkfs, and untar. It won't be a sector restore but it would be a filesystem restore, which should be sufficient. The partitions which have unknown filesystems can be dumped, just like now, using 'dd'. The advantages with tar/dar is that you can do incremental images. And its so damn easy to traverse, delete and insert files later just like ghost explorer.
Why is gzipped tar on the known filesystems not sufficient for a partition backup? Do we lose some information (may be like ATTRS)?
Good point.
1. Yes, you can, and maybe we will do that in the future. :)
2. The image tools, like partimage, ntfsclone and partclone, support some filesystems that Linux kernel does not support well (some only read-only function exists) and user space packages do not exist on Linux. Say, HFS+, UFS, NTFS... In the early days, say, NTFS was not well supported in Linux, and partimage already supported that very well.
3. Some solutions are for clone, not for backup. When we said clone, it's 100% identical. Of course, you can argue that it's not necessary, but it's easier and faster if you do sectors clone, not file saving and restoring. Since in this case, only user space program is enough to make it. You do not have to hack kernel for filesystem r/w mounting. For example, HFS+ now in Linux kernel only supports reading only, not writing.
> You do not have to hack kernel for filesystem r/w mounting. For example, HFS+ now in Linux kernel only supports
> reading only, not writing
Agreed. But we end up not providing enough features (and I think traversal, deletion, addition and incremental backup are very important features) with disks which have only ext3 or reiserfs partitions on them. So, it should be such that if we can, we provide the features. If we can't, we fall back to other dirty methods.
All filesystems I care about are well supported right now by linux: ext2/3, reiserfs, fat, fat32, ntfs (have been using ntfs3g for a while now). So, I want my explorer...like now....;-)
> All filesystems I care about are well supported right now by linux: ext2/3, reiserfs, fat, fat32, ntfs (have been using ntfs3g for a while now).
That's true. We think about this before, and maybe will implement such function in the future release. Another benefit is, by supporting file based backup, we can do online backup, i.e. a mounted partition can be saved, too. However, this is a big improvement hence big change, so I think it won't happen very soon.