create an image like norton ghost in ubuntu

[Ray Parrish]

habtool wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 15:17 -0800, Ray Parrish wrote:
>   
>> mierda tuti wrote:
>>     
>>> HI,
>>>
>>> I have kubuntu 8.10 and I would like to create an image like norton 
>>> ghost do it in windows.
>>>
>>> Many thanks and sorry for my english,
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>> You already have the dd command on your system, and it makes bit by
>> bit 
>> copies of drives, which are exact images of the source drive. For 
>> instructions on it's usage see this link -
>>
>> <http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=149328>
>>
>> Later, Ray Parrish
>>     
>
> I have had good results from partimage
>
> http://www.partimage.org/Partimage-FAQ
> Partimage vs others
> [edit] What does partimage give you over the following: clear the free
> blocks with DD, and copy with DD
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/filetmp
> rm /mnt/filetmp 
> dd if=/dev/xxx
> gzip > image_file.gz
>      1. Partimage is faster. You don't have to wait for "dd
>         if=/dev/zero" first. during the copy, free blocks are not read.
>         Then, if 20 % of the partition is used, partimage will avoid two
>         access to 80 % of the free areas. 
>      2. There's a GUI (graphical user interface). It has a lot of
>         advantages: you can see the remaining time, the percentage of
>         the copy, ... The Qt GUI in the next version will be very nice
>         and easy to use. 
>      3. Partimage can work on file systems which are not supported
>         (stable write support) by the Linux kernel, such as NTFS, BSD
>         ffs, XFS/JFS in a non-patched kernel. To run "dd if=/dev/zero",
>         you need the write support in Linux. 
>      4. Partimage is made to be easy to use, and to replace commercial
>         software such as Ghost, Drive Image, ... and the user does not
>         have to know many command lines. 
>      5. Partimage has a lot of options, such as -V which allow th create
>         a new volume if space is missing. DD will show and error and
>         abort. 
>      6. The network support allows to save an image file from a client,
>         without having to configure both client and server NFS. (Network
>         File System). When the multicast will be implemented, it will
>         allow to restore X clients from 1 server, and DD can't do a such
>         multicast copy. 
>      7. We provide rootdisk and bootcd. You can boot on it, if Linux is
>         not installed on your computer. They contains everything that is
>         need (the LZO compression in 0.7, which is very useful for big
>         files). You don't have all these tools on every boot rescue
>         systems.
>
>
>   
Wow! That's a lot of good points. I had heard of partimage before, but 
hadn't spent any time reading about it yet. I'm a Linux noob, so I'm 
learning something new every day.

Thanks for educating me! I'll look into installing partimage right after 
I send this.

One other thing I can think of about dd is it's nickname "data 
destroyer", one little typo in your call to it can wreak havoc, and a 
gui tool doesn't suffer from this problem as much.

Now if I could just afford another drive to make some copies of my 
partitions on, I'd be set. 8-)

Later, Ray Parrish

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