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From: Szakacsits S. <sz...@si...> - 2003-11-19 05:26:07
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Hi Karl, On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Kiniger, Karl (MED) wrote: > Ntfsclone works great for me but it would be great to have some > streaming oriented output as well. What you want is what Ian Jackson implemented, ntfsimage: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ntfs-dev&m=104982728729178&w=2 The minor problem is, he never submitted the code even if he promised it several times ... > Imagine having a ntfs partition size 80GB and, say 2 GB of data. That > means that about 78 GB of zeroes will have to be compressed (the will > compress fine) but the problem comes when one wants to write the stuff > back in order to restore the partition: 78 GB will have to written no > matter if the unused space should be zeroed out or not. Partition image > just writes out the used blocks (hopefully so, I have read the ntfs > mailing list archive) which would be quite fast in the case described > above. Yes, I know. Either you must have ntfsimage, if Ian releases it or ntfsclone must have built in compression/tar support. > I know about the sparse file option of tar but in my typical case I > dont have a big enough sparse-file-capable filesystem available. You do have ;) - create a big file on FAT/NTFS - boot Linux - create a Linux filesystem on it - loopback mount it R/W (this is safe and doable with the rewritten NTFS driver, version 2) - ntfsclone > Maybe something like a format which interleaves descriptor blocks > with data, eg.e [disk address,count,actual data][..] perhaps with > some tags mixed in,crc etc... This would allow efficient network transmission Yes and reinventing 'tar' as Ian did. Ian's excuse was some size limits in the tar format (see above email) but later on he wasn't sure anymore. > as well but the biggest benefit would be that not the whole unused > disk space has to be written. > > What do you think? Of course you're right but I definitely don't have the time for this (data relocation support for ntfsresize is a higher priority). If one wants to add libtar and libbzip2/libgzip support to ntfsclone that would be great. The other way, adding ntfs (and other fs) support for tar to backup at sector level is also OK and IMHO should be easier and the correct way but I doubt tar maintainers want to do that, maybe you could ask. Cheers, Szaka |
