On 23 Nov 2020 at 12:50, Samuel Sieb wrote:

Subject:                Re: Clone logical volume using dd
To:                     users@lists.fedoraproject.org
From:                   Samuel Sieb <sam...@sieb.net>
Date sent:              Mon, 23 Nov 2020 12:50:46 -0800
Send reply to:          Community support for Fedora users 
<users@lists.fedoraproject.org>

> On 11/23/20 1:02 AM, Michael D. Setzer II via users wrote:
> > dd bs=1M if=$localback |lzop -c - > /mnt/local$localpath$localimagename
> > 
> > I use lzop for compression of image, since it gives good compress and is 
> > considerable faster than gzip.
> > 
> > Note: Since it does copy all blocks, it is best to clear the currently 
> > unused blocks before hand. Long ago, did an image of a disk with clean 
> > install of Fedora 3 on 80GB disk. Image created was 12G in size 
> > compress. Cleared free space, and redid imaged, and size dropped to 
> > 2.5G. Compression does depend on what is on disk..
> 
> This is still not suitable for his purpose.  It's not about the 
> compressed size, it's about the number of blocks copied.  Using dd, you 
> are still copying *all* the unused blocks which will be really bad for a 
> thin LV which is the intended destination.

The difference between a bit level image and an image that has to 
understand all aspects of the partition info. If the unused data blocks are 
cleared by filling with nulls, it compress to nothing. The resulting images 
are very similar in size. 

Agree, it takes longer to make the image, since it does have to read all 
blocks of the disk/partition, but it copies all data. Using a program that 
determines what needs to be backed up and what doesn't may or may not 
copy everything at some point. 

With the disk bit level images, one could restore to a new disk, and not 
have to do any prep of creating the partition setup, since that was already 
included in the image. With partitions, that isn't an issue.

I had linux and windows on my classroom machines, and sometimes 
imaged one system to all the other machines using udpcast with bit level 
image. Also, had options to be able to restore the windows image in 
about 10 minutes to its partition from the local extra partition.  

So, just another option. 


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+------------------------------------------------------------+
 Michael D. Setzer II - Computer Science Instructor (Retired)     
 mailto:mi...@guam.net                            
 mailto:msetze...@gmail.com
 Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
 G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer 
 http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+------------------------------------------------------------+


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