Is there anything like a Norton Ghost for Linux?

[Kaido]

Server-wise, it'd be nice to have a set of reinstall CDs like Ghost makes for Linux. Does anything like that exist?

 

[sykopath79]

Have you tried using Ghost to make an image of the drive? I haven't ever tried making a Ghost image of a Linux volume before; I know Ghost doesn't care what OS is installed but I don't know if it has restrictions as far as what types of partitions it's able to deal with.

 

[BlueWeasel]

Wouldn't a boot CD of the latest version of Ghost or TrueImage work?

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: sykopath79
Have you tried using Ghost to make an image of the drive? I haven't ever tried making a Ghost image of a Linux volume before; I know Ghost doesn't care what OS is installed but I don't know if it has restrictions as far as what types of partitions it's able to deal with.

Hmm. I'm using 2003 edition, which requires Ghost to be installed into Windows, then you make the discs.

 

[Nothinman]

Ghost has supported ext2 and ext3 filesystems since like the 5.0 days, but now that Symantec bought PowerQuest and made Ghost a rebadged version of DriveImage I have no idea.

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Server-wise, it'd be nice to have a set of reinstall CDs like Ghost makes for Linux. Does anything like that exist?

I haven't used it yet, but a linux geek friend pointed me towards
g4u
when I asked him about creating an image for my linux box.

 

[ttown]

dd ?

 

[Nothinman]

ghost4unix doesn't understand any filesystems, it's essentially a wrapper around dd. So the images you create will be the size of the disk not the data in the filesystem.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Acronis True Image makes a bootable CD, not sure if it can save its images to linux partitions so you might need a fat32 data partition to write them to.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I was going to recommend g4u. Avoid g4l though.

 

[nweaver]

dd. There is a switch to make the unused space take up almost no space in the image.

 

[Nothinman]

dd. There is a switch to make the unused space take up almost no space in the image.

No there's not. What some people recommend doing though is creating a huge file of zeros to fill the drive's free space, this way it will compress the free space to virtually nothing.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: ttown
dd ?

I believe Linus himself has said this is "insane", but it has worked well for me.

 

[Nothinman]

Linus most likely says it's a bad idea because reading directly from the block device bypasses the page cache. So if you're doing this on a live filesystem there's a chance (how high depends on usage of the fs) that you'll get stale information in your image or at the worst case a corrupt image.

 

[sourceninja]

Novell can do imaging via zenworks and that can run off linux (or so i'm told) http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/4482.html .

I've always used dd myself

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Linus most likely says it's a bad idea because reading directly from the block device bypasses the page cache. So if you're doing this on a live filesystem there's a chance (how high depends on usage of the fs) that you'll get stale information in your image or at the worst case a corrupt image.

I never do it on a mounted file system. I've googled on it briefly but didn't come up with the issue, but I'm pretty sure it was dd

 

[Nothinman]

Linus has also commented on dump because of the same issues, I believe xfsdump doesn't have any problems or at least you can use xfs_freeze to get a stable snapshot.

 

[Kaido]

Hmm. I'm wondering if it would just be better to make a linux-from-scratch CD, complete with configs and all. It'd still need installation though. The thing I love about Ghost for Windows is that it can hook a blank system up in like 20 minutes, which is great.

 

[Nothinman]

Knoppix has a hd-installer, you don't get the same affect as using an image but you get a known starting point in a few minutes and the disc is already built for you.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I never even knew disk imaging software was file system dependant. Is it? Figured you can image anything you want, really. But I never tried non windows systems though... I use acronis at home, restore a 1 gig image in a matter of minutes, sometimes less then a minute, not sure how it manages to be so fast.

 

[Nothinman]

You can ignore the filesystem if you want, but then you get an image the size of the entire filesystem instead of just the data it contains. And you lose out on a lot of the nicer features like being able to restore the data to a larger or smaller filesystem.

 

[pcgeek11]

I like Acronis True Image V8. It makes a bootable restore CD using linux OS, the only one that I have been able to find that works with the reiser file system correctly ( it only copies the data, so the image is small. Ghost will not image the reiser fs correctly as it makes the image the same size as the drive.

pcgeek11

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: pcgeek11
I like Acronis True Image V8. It makes a bootable restore CD using linux OS, the only one that I have been able to find that works with the reiser file system correctly ( it only copies the data, so the image is small. Ghost will not image the reiser fs correctly as it makes the image the same size as the drive. pcgeek11

Exactly correct! The TrueImage created boot CD uses Linux for its GUI, etc. When you create the bootable CD with TI 8, and use it - your operating system then becomes irrelevant. It will image or clone what ever it is correctly.

 

[nweaver]

Altiris will do this. The Rdeploy.exe file you call from the network boot works great. It fails on FC2+ because of some wierd EXT2/3 stuff the did. Will do block copy on non fat/ntfs/ext2/ext3 drives.

 

[pcgeek11]

Originally posted by: nweaver
Altiris will do this. The Rdeploy.exe file you call from the network boot works great. It fails on FC2+ because of some wierd EXT2/3 stuff the did. Will do block copy on non fat/ntfs/ext2/ext3 drives.

mweaver,

Does Altris image Reiser FS correctly or have you tried it on Reiser?

pcgeek11