[aklug] Re: Clonezilla

damien@linuxninjas.tv wrote, on 10/11/2009 5:00 PM:
> Just read an article on clonezilla. I'm thinking about using it. Trouble is I need a place to store the image. Then there's the off sight backup issue.
>
> I've got a computer I can use for this but I would need a 2TB drive. Two in a RAID 1 configuration would be nice. That's more then enough space to backup the 250GB drive in my laptop.
>
> Any one want to add to this?

I use Clonezilla on occasion; I find it useful. It's not necessarily
intended for off-site backup purposes so much as for cloning drives,
etc. - hence the name. ;-) If you wanted to use Clonezilla for
disaster recovery, I think that one would be far better off cloning to
another drive and leaving it in one's Mom's basement - unless that's
where one was already located. :-)

Otherwise, I would use something that speaks filesystem-level rather
than block-level for remote backups, so that the diff algorithms can
be more efficient (a la rsync). Rsyncing a big file that is just
aware of a big wad of data at the block level would be inefficient, I
think.

Though now that I think about it, using rsync to update an ISO that
has only had a few changes is supposed to be efficient, so maybe I'm
crazy ... I haven't done much empirical testing. But maybe using
rsync to keep a remote Clonezilla archive updated might be doable. It
would be easy to test:

1. Clonezilla your 250G drive to another attached drive to clone1
2. Do something small - upgrade a few minor packages.
3. Clone again to clone2.
4. cp clone1 clone1.bak
5. rsync clone2 clone1 (so that it's all local). Note stats at end.
6. Do a big change - upgrade lots of packages, etc.
7. Repeat test, note stats, compare.

Royce
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Received on Sun Oct 11 17:33:44 2009