To avoid changes on the fly its possible to use snapshot. I am wondering, what will happen if ill feed dd through gzip. Will it compress the empty spaces ?
-------------------------------------------------- Michael Ben-Nes - Internet Consultant and Director. http://www.epoch.co.il - weaving the Net. Cellular: 054-4848113 -------------------------------------------------- On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzaf...@cohens.org.il>wrote: > On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 12:35:48AM +0200, sammy ominsky wrote: > > On 31/12/2009, at 00:27, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote: > > > > > doing the backup. dd is nice, but that will copy also the empty space > > > (although it won't have impact on the size of the backup, it will have > an > > > impact on the time it takes). > > > > dd has a --sparse flag which makes it not copy empty space. > > I don't see such a flag in the man page. > > partimage avoids copying any "free" block (block marked as free by the > file system). If that block also happens to be zeroed out, dd is not > aware of such details. And frankly can't safely be aware of them if Hetz > want to copy a mounted partition. > > Also note that if you use dd to copy a mounted partition, you copy > different parts of it in different times. This is tricky at best. Unless > you e.g. use an LVM with a snapshot. > > tar (or any other backup of files) is safer. Even there you don't get a > complete snapshot of the system. But at least every file is valid. > > -- > Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is > http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's > tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best > ICQ# 16849754 | | friend > > _______________________________________________ > Linux-il mailing list > Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il > http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il >
_______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
