| Excellent post! I'm not the OP but this scratches and itch for me particularly since it is a bare metal solution
Thanks Subject: Re: backup snapshot
Date: August 7, 2015 10:58:25 PM EDT
Not a snapshot, but there are various programs that can do a bare image of
the system and it works with Windows and LInux. They can be done at the
partition level or the entire disk.
I am the current maintainer of the G4L project, and there is also GNU and
Clonezilla that can do similar things.
With my classroom lab that has systems with 500G disks with windows 7 and
Fedora. I have a 160G W7 partition, and make an image of it to another
partition that is about 24G in size. Takes about 12 minutes to make image,
and about 10 minutes to restore. Have an option on the grub menu that can
automatically, restore it, so if students mess up windows, it can be quickly
restored to the previous image. Use NTFSCLONE option for the windows.
Similar process can be done with Linux, but since it has multiple partitions,
one needs to do an image of each one, or one can do a full disk image, but it
has to be made to another device like external disk or ftp server.
Another recommendation, unlike NTFSCLONE, which only backs up used
data, the raw method will be much more effictive if the unused space on each
partition is cleared (Nulls written to sectors). Program has options to do this,
and then make images of each partition or the whole disk.Does take time
since it has to read every sector, but image is much smaller with
compression.
I have gotten even better speeds by using USB3 128G flash. Using the USB
3 flash, the same windows partition can be reimaged in about 4 1/2 minutes
using USB 3 port. Takes about 8 minutes in a USB 2 port. Single hard disk
takes longer, since it has to read and write from same device. The time to
create the image is about the same, since the compression process seems to
be the bottle neck there.
I generally always, make images of critical machines, and home machine, so
that if something goes wrong, I can quickly get a machine back and running
to a known state. One could just backup the /boot, and / and maybe /home
partitions depending on setup, and restore them.
The G4L also, has a program calles fsarchiver that is a filelevel backup
program that works with Linux, but I included it as a request of a user, and
have time limited testing, in which it worked fine, but prefer the bare metal
options.
So, not sure if that is the solution you are looking for.
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