Other Backing up a device which lots of free space

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 said:
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.
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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.
 
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 said:
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.
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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:-

serverfault.com

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 serverfault.com

Looks like I need to sudo su before I run the mount command.
 
Note to self when I was grappling with a similar situation/

T

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

balanga said:
Actually my server is using ZFS...
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Good, glad to hear.

balanga said:
Should my /etc/exports be written differently?
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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).

T-Daemon said:
Code: 
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):
Code: 
zfs create -p zroot/repo/backup/clonezilla
Click to expand...

It looks like (from the mount(8) output above in # 11, missing a /repo mount)...
 
Balanga likes to make guessing games. He is just like that.
Posting his configs , his partitions , his filesystems , or even his type of bootrecord is not for him. Certainly not the commands he entered on the keyboard & the results it gave. Mostly it's , it does not work. :)
 
Alain De Vos said:
Balanga likes to make guessing games. He is just like that.
Posting his configs , his partitions , his filesystems , or even his type of bootrecord is not for him. Certainly not the commands he entered on the keyboard & the results it gave. Mostly it's , it does not work. :)
Click to expand...
balanga is a joy: at least in the end he answers. Few of mine clients were so reluctant to answer questions about the specification details that I seriously considered hiring a torturer just to extract meaningful information.
:)
 
cracauer@ said:
Oh come on. The error message clearly says your fstab is screwed up. Did it occur to you to post it?
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You mean the fstab on clonezilla which has just booted via PXE?

If you insists. here it is:-

Code: 
# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM
overlay / overlay rw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev 0 0

But I suspect the error msg has no real bearing on the problem.
 
Would it just be easier to take that old drive out, put a sticker on it saying "windows XP", and put one of your spare SSD's from the parts box in the machine? I think I would be tempted to do that, just to save the hassle. If you're anything like me you've probably got a few SSD's lying around the place.
 
First, I would
balanga said:
Does anyone have any suggestions about how to backup/archive a disk which has lots of free space?

The only way I can think of is to use dd & gzip.

Is there is a better alternative?
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First, I would fill up the disk with zeroed out files so you get a very good compression rate (otherwise the free disk space might actually contain data since (depending on the filesystem) deleting a file is often just "unlinking", so the bits and bytes mostly stay on the disk), then I would use dd + zstd to archive the disk. That's how I archive virtual machine images. zstd works much faster than gzip, and offers better compression.
 
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