On 11/07/10 19:55, Charles Kroeger wrote:
It looks as if the point you're missing is the nature of an image.
Thanks for your reply. I was aware of the nature of an image, that's what I
like about them. If your HD blows up or your computer is stolen just restore the
image to the new hardware a chasteningly but wiser user perhaps but not the
disaster I read in "The Buffalo News" about a woman whose laptop containing ten
years of musical composition, was stolen with its contents being the only
copies. Ten years without backing up, imagine that.
I was hoping however that if one changed the file system on the backup media,
then the 'data,' would be saved to the file system. At that point one could
then change the file system of the source partition with mkfs.ext4 [I'm using
unstable here] then restore the image as envisioned above. Grub2 is on board so
the ext4 image should boot. I would have to change some labeling in fstab
probably.
Is this just magical thinking?
Afraid so. An image copy is taken at a level closer to the hardware than
the filesystem is. The data files are copied into the image still firmly
embedded into the filesystem, along with all its metadata.
It's a bit like a tar archive containing not only a set of files, but
also their directory structure. When you open the tarfile, you find the
original directory structure inside, and the files can't be restored
straight from the tarfile into a different directory structure, they
have to be picked out one at a time.
I haven't had any dealings with ext4 yet, but it would appear possible
to convert a system from ext3 to ext4. Is this not an option for you?
--
Joe
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