Can Rescuezilla be used to backup a partition or whole disk sector by sector without having to be able to read or understand the file system on the hard drive or partition? I was considering using Rescuezilla to backup a VMWare ESXi installation and the vmfs file system that ESXi uses is not compatible with ntfs, fat32, ext3, ext4, etc.
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When using the standard backup/restore buttons in Rescuezilla, the filesystem-aware imaging tool named partclone is used. When a backup is made of a filesystem that is not yet supported by partclone (such as an encrypted partition), a sector-by-sector image is automatically made using the application partclone.dd.
This means Rescuezilla can safely backup and restore filesystems not yet known to partclone without any issues.
I should mention that according to the manual, partclone does have filesystem-aware support for VMFS filesystems. However, Rescuezilla v2.1.1 does not have partclone.vmfs executable available, so a sector-by-sector backup of VMFS filesystems will be made. I'm not exactly sure why partclone.vmfs is not available, but most likely the Debian and Ubuntu maintainers have decided not to compile support for VMFS for some reason.
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Side note: This forum topic is about filesystems that are not supported by partclone.
There's also the case of filesystems that are supported by partclone but have some problem such as residing on a disk that is physically dying, or being damaged in some other way. For such hard drives the filesystem-aware nature of partclone may cause an issue when making a backup because it can't fully interpret the data it needs to.
Can Rescuezilla be used to backup a partition or whole disk sector by sector without having to be able to read or understand the file system on the hard drive or partition? I was considering using Rescuezilla to backup a VMWare ESXi installation and the vmfs file system that ESXi uses is not compatible with ntfs, fat32, ext3, ext4, etc.
Hi Anonymous,
When using the standard backup/restore buttons in Rescuezilla, the filesystem-aware imaging tool named partclone is used. When a backup is made of a filesystem that is not yet supported by partclone (such as an encrypted partition), a sector-by-sector image is automatically made using the application
partclone.dd.This means Rescuezilla can safely backup and restore filesystems not yet known to partclone without any issues.
I should mention that according to the manual, partclone does have filesystem-aware support for VMFS filesystems. However, Rescuezilla v2.1.1 does not have
partclone.vmfsexecutable available, so a sector-by-sector backup of VMFS filesystems will be made. I'm not exactly sure whypartclone.vmfsis not available, but most likely the Debian and Ubuntu maintainers have decided not to compile support for VMFS for some reason.Side note: This forum topic is about filesystems that are not supported by partclone.
There's also the case of filesystems that are supported by partclone but have some problem such as residing on a disk that is physically dying, or being damaged in some other way. For such hard drives the filesystem-aware nature of partclone may cause an issue when making a backup because it can't fully interpret the data it needs to.
For such dying disks, the tool GNU ddrescue is much more suitable than using partclone. Rescuezilla will eventually add a GNU ddrescue frontend as part of task #143 (Add "data salvage" function (based on GNU ddrescue) to create backup images of dying drives) and to a lesser extent task #142 (Add ability to restore (and explore) raw "dd" whole disk images, ISO9660 filesystems).
Last edit: Rescuezilla 2020-12-20