Re: What would I do without partimage?
William Ballard wrote:
I literally would be unable to use Microsoft Windows if I couldn't stay
mostly booted in Debian and manage that godawfulness with partimage.
Every time I boot into it I restore a clean partimage of XP, let it puke
all over itself, then restore the cleanness.
It's the only thing that makes patching Windows remotely tolerable.
Eventually partimage will stop working on new versions of NTFS, and it
seems to not be maintained anymore. It was removed from Sarge.
Are there other tools that work like Ghost but in Linux? Partimage is
great.
Maybe this is just a case where in Unix you don't need weird tools to do a
routine task, or what *should* be routine in any sanely designed OS.*
I've always just used the cp command, e.g. "cp /dev/hda>disk_image" or
"cp /dev/hda1>partition_image to back up a disk or partition, respectively.
(dd also works but I just don't trust it.)
I've never tried to gzip or bzip the resulting image file, but if that works
then I don't see much advantage using partimage or Ghost. They may be of marginal
value if they are smart enough to automatically detect and adjust to differing
drive geometries. I don't think cp or dd can handle that by itself.
*What prompts this remark is an industrial application I heard about, where
a large number of identically configured systems used "ghost" (or similar tool)
to reinstall a pristine copy of XP each time the systems were booted, i.e. at
least once per day! (True story.)
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