Other Backing up a device which lots of free space

[blackbird9]

Maybe have a look at clonezilla https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
I haven't used it myself, but other people have told me it works.

 

[cracauer@]

Windows XP will generally not boot anyway when you change the PC too much or use a different one.

To make compression of the disk image more effective you should write a large file of zeros to fill up the filesystem, then unlink it.

You should have given us these details earlier, we couldn't guess what you were trying to do.

 

[balanga]

Maybe have a look at clonezilla https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
I haven't used it myself, but other people have told me it works.

I'm in the process of trying to get working via PXE, but can't get an NFS mount set up properly.

Rather I think I did about ten years ago, but I'm trying to create a script so that I can automatically back up any disk I attach to my PXE client machine.

 

[OpenFreeNet]

Its a disk with an installation of Windows XP which I'd like to keep a backup copy of in case I need again at some time so I don't have to go through the pain of installing it again.

I never used this approach, but it can be useful:
* execute on Windows XP (if you can boot it) sdelete -z C:. The name is scaring, but it fill with zero only the unused sectors of your disk. But double-check. Do not use "-c" because it puts random byte. If the file system is highly fragmented, maybe defragment it using the Windows XP utilities.
* then on FreeBSD, dd -conv=sparse will "compress" the zero bytes into a sparse file.
* also without using the sparse file on the dd side, gzip can compress the sequence of zero bytes. The same for every compressed VM image format.

To be honest, I will do all these operations inside a VM running Windows XP, working on a first version of your disk image, without touching directly the original disk. I don't know if bhyve is good enough, because it has problems with old BIOS boot process. It requires UEFI.

 

[cracauer@]

You don't need the backup file to be sparse if you compress it.

Instead of compressing disk backup files I store them uncompressed on a ZFS with compression and dedup enabled. That gives huge savings with incremental new backups of the same install that you can't get with compressed files.

 

[balanga]

I'm in the process of trying to get working via PXE, but can't get an NFS mount set up properly.

Rather I think I did about ten years ago, but I'm trying to create a script so that I can automatically back up any disk I attach to my PXE client machine.

When I drop into the shell in Clonezilla (based on Debian) I try to mount the NFS share but get this error which means nothing to me:-

mount.nfs: failed to apply fstab options


I just found this link which I will try to comprehend:-

mount.nfs: failed to apply fstab options when mount nfs file system in fedora 32

This is my nfs service status in Fedora 32: [dolphin@MiWiFi-R4CM-srv infrastructure]$ sudo systemctl status nfs-server.service ● nfs-server.service - NFS server and services Loaded: loaded (/u...

serverfault.com

Looks like I need to sudo su before I run the mount command.

 

[balanga]

Note to self when I was grappling with a similar situation/

T

Post in thread 'NFS v3 & v4 on same server'

Feb 27, 2024

Actually my server is using ZFS...

Good, glad to hear.

Should my /etc/exports be written differently?

It can stay that way, you need only to create a "repo" data set, to put it on a separate file system than "/" (which is zroot/ROOT/default).

zfs create -o mountpoint=/repo zroot/repo
mkdir -p /repo/backup/clonezilla

Or "backup" and "clonezilla" can be separate data sets (after creating zroot/repo):

zfs create -p zroot/repo/backup/clonezilla

It looks like (from the mount(8) output above in # 11, missing a /repo mount)...

• T-Daemon

 

[cracauer@]

Oh come on. The error message clearly says your fstab is screwed up. Did it occur to you to post it?