On 27 Mar 2009 at 12:42, Bill Crawford wrote:
From: Bill Crawford billcrawford1970@gmail.com Organization: None To: fedora-list@redhat.com Subject: Re: Backing up system Date sent: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:42:56 +0000 Copies to: "Michael D. Setzer II" mikes@kuentos.guam.net
On Friday 27 March 2009 09:01:30 Michael D. Setzer II wrote:
It does work best if you clear unused space before doing an image to reduce space since the null filled sectors compress to almost nothing.
How do you do that?
The cd has various scripts and programs on it to help. cleandrive is the simplest script that free space for linux/unix.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20M rm /0bits
That script does it, but no feedback on process. cleandrive5 and cleandrive6 do the same but use Dialog or Xdialog to provide a progress bar. The require the appropriate dialog program be installed and the jetcat-mod program copied to the / directory.
For fat32 and ntfs partitions blank6.exe can be used to clear free space for Windows. The is a lblank6 linux program that does a similar task from linux on the mounted fat32 or ntfs partition.
Additionally, there are other programs on the web that do this.
Long ago, I had done a Fedora 3 full install on a 80GB disk, and did an image. Produced a 12GB compressed image file. Then cleared unused space, and redid image. Only a 2.5GB image file. So, the random information from the drive took 9.5GB of space.
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