Restoring individual files

[Jan-Pieter van den Heuvel]

Hello everybody,

I have backupped the disk in my server to an image with the latest CloneZilla LiveCD (1.0.7-18) with the default settings. Is it possible to restore individual files from the created image? I've read in another thread that it is not possible to mount the image(s), but is there another way to restore individual files from the backup image (without the use of a second harddisk to restore the image to)?

Thanks in advance.

Jan-Pieter van den Heuvel

[Steven Shiau]

Do you know which program that Clonezilla used to save your file system ? partimage, ntfsclone or dd  ?
If it's dd, it's straightforward.
If it's partimage or ntfsclone, it is still possible. Maybe you can restore the image into a file, then loop mount it.

[Jan-Pieter van den Heuvel]

Thank you for your quick response.

The partitions on the disk are ext3, so it probably was not ntfsclone :)
The entire disk was backupped and I used the default options.
This resulted in the following files:

disk
parts
sda1.aa
sda2.aa
sda4.aa-sda4.an
sda-chs.sf
sda-mbr
sda-pt.sf
swappt-sda3.info

How can I determine which progam was used?

The files I want to restore are somewhere in the sda4.aa-sda4.an files. In the release notes of CloneZilla Live I found that the default compression was changed to gzip, so I believe these are splitted gzip files. I have tried to concatenate them to one big file and then extract it, but this produces a "invalid compressed data--format violated" error (after 5 minutes or so). However testing the big file using 'gzip -t' produces no errors.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Steven Shiau]

About "I have tried to concatenate them to one big file and then extract it, but this produces a "invalid compressed data--format violated" error (after 5 minutes or so)."
What's the command you run ?

[Jan-Pieter van den Heuvel]

I copied the sda4.aa file from the backup to the local harddisk and appended the sda4.ab-sda4.an files using 'cat file >> /path/to/sda4.aa' for each file (in the correct order). Then I tried to run 'gunzip -S .aa sda4.aa' on the file, but this produced the error message mentioned. 'gzip -t sda4.aa' produces no error. Testing the file took about 10 minutes.

[Steven Shiau]

You can use command file to decide the compression program like:
file /home/partimag/$IMAGENAME/sda4.aa

I guess sda4.aa should be the partimage with gzip/lzop/bzip2.
Take gzip as an example:
cat /home/partimag/$IMAGENAME/sda4.a* | gunzip -dc > sda4.image

Then use command file to make sure its format:
file sda4.image
If it's partimage, you can use partimage to restore sda4.image to a loop device:
First, create an enough large size file (Take 2000 MB as an example):
dd if=/dev/zero of=img.raw bs=1M count=2000
losetup /dev/loop/0 img.raw (or losetup /dev/loop0 img.raw)

Then restore the image to /dev/loop/0
/opt/drbl/sbin/partimage -M -f3 -b -o -d restore /dev/loop/0 sda4.image

Once it's done, use:
losetup -d /dev/loop/0

Then you can mount img.raw like:
mount -o loop -t ext3 img.raw /mnt
The files are in /mnt now.