Looking for stable solid disk/partition imaging software
 

Hello All,

We are currently using ghost in our enterprise environment to make disk and partition images of systems for emergency recovery of OS components. I have a few problems and was hoping some of you could recommend some free software that might do the trick...

What I need:
1. Ability to clone an entire disk or just a single partition
2. Cannot install software on AIS / Need to boot from CD or USB drive and image to CD or other removable media
3. Must be able to handle NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, HPFS, maybe some other older UNIX file systems.
4. Reliability of finished images

What Ghost does or doesn't do:
1. Image a linux/Unix partition seem to have to do "bit by bit" image of the entire drive for some linux/unix filesystems
2. 50/50 shot of having a good image after 7 hours and 10 dvd's
3. Ghost doesn't work with all types of hardware. I have about 12 or so different versions of boot disks to support various hardware

Thanks in advance!

You can easily produce an image of a partition or a drive using the "dd" command. Because of the Unix philosophy "Everything is a file" you could even use "cat" or redirection to do it as well as long as you are the root user. You can also pipe the output of "dd" through "split" and "bzip2" or "gzip" to compress the slices. If you are using a Fat32 formatted external drive to backup the image, you need to split the output to slices less than 2GB.

You didn't indicate the size of the partitions or drives that you want to back up this way. The hard part may be restoring from DVDs if you have to split up the image among several disks. It would be easier if you would back up the images to an external usb drive. (If you have a large USB drive containing reasonably sized slices, then you could also use "par2" to produce some parity files to protect the backup if one or more of the slices becomes damaged.)
Then you can cat the pieces together like this:
cat sda.iso.0?? | dd bs=$BLOCKSIZE of=/dev/sda
Like I said, you can insert bzip2/bunzip2 or gzip/gunzip in the pipe for both the backup & restore commands.

If you were to backup slices to a DVD, you may need to write a script that prompts for a DVD to be inserted.
It would be possible to produce a script that either names the slices so that they contain a block offset, or to produce a simple csv file containing the slice names and offsets. The dd command has "seek" and "skip" options. They could be used so that the order of restoring a slice of the image doesn't matter.

You may want to have a look at mondo and mindi, they are really flexible and powerful.

Thanks for the feedback! I will definitely be looking at these options for my *NIX stuff.

Thanks

You might want to read any documentation for your filesystem's support. For example, the ntfs-clone program could be used to produce an image of an ntfs filesystem. It would be more efficient because it will skip unused areas of the disk. For XFS, look at xfsdump. If you use dd to produce an image, the image file will compress better if the free space is zeroed out. For example, if you reinstall a system on an 80GB drive, using 3 GB of space, the old data on the drive will cause the image to be closer to 80GB than to 3 GB. If you zero out a drive before reusing it, the compressed image will be in the 1-3GB range and you will be able to backup your initial installation on a single DVD backup. I had fooled around creating an image file, mounting it, and compared using dd | gzip versus dd | bzip2. I also filled the FS with dummy files of "zeros" (using dd if=/dev/zero to create the files) and then backed up the FS again to a compressed image. The size difference was dramatic, far exceeding any difference between bzip2 and gzip.