Looking for application to clone a disk with incremental backup

[Michael D. Setzer II]

On 10 Sep 2015 at 20:08, Paul Smith wrote:

Date sent:      	Thu, 10 Sep 2015 20:08:53 +0100
Subject:        	Looking for application to clone a disk with incremental 
backup
From:           	Paul Smith <phhs80 at gmail.com>
To:             	Community support for Fedora users 
<users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
Send reply to:  	Community support for Fedora users 
<users at lists.fedoraproject.org>

> Dear All,
> 
> Do you know of some application to clone a disk with incremental
> backup? I know about clonezilla, but, unfortunately, clonezilla does
> not have yet differential/incremental backup implemented. (
> http://clonezilla.org/ )
> 
> Thanks in advance,

I've been the maintaner of the G4L disk imaging project since 2004, would 
see huge issues with trying to handle differential/incremental clone process. 
Some things that can make the process better is to clear out the unused 
space, since the clone process using dd copies all sectors regardless of if 
they have currently used data. Once did a clean install of Fedora on an 80G 
disk, and did a disk image, and it created a 12G image file using lzop 
compression. Then cleared all the partition by writing nulls to the unused 
space, and the image size dropped to 2.5G. 

On my classroom machines have Fedora 22, and Windows 7 at the moment. 
Have an sda8 partition, where I store and ntfsclone image of the windows 
160G partition that is about 30G in size of the about 55G of used space. 
Takes about 15 minutes to make a new complete image, and about 12 
minutes to restore. Using a USB 2 flash the process takes about 8 minutes to 
restore, and 4 1/2 minutes from an USB 3. NTFSCLONE is a filelevel image 
process, so only backs up used space.

Also, make separate partition images of the Fedora partitions on the sda8 
partition, and can make full disk images to external drive of the disk. 

Also, have a filelevel program as part of project that I added at the request of 
a user called fsarchiver, and it can do file level backups, so it is similar to the 
ntfsclone for windows. Still recommend doing a full dd type clone, but 
perhaps using these images as quicker process. 

Actually, add the g4l option as part of the regular boot process, so the 
windows partition can be automatically restored by just selecting the option 
on the grub menu. Since once loaded it is running in ram, it doesn't require a 
cd or usb boot disk.

What size disk/partitions are you imaging, and what times is it taking. G4L 
uses lzop for compression, which was about twice as fast as gzip when 
making images, but about 10% larger image size. Uncompression speeds 
where almose identical.


> 
> Paul
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+----------------------------------------------------------+
  Michael D. Setzer II -  Computer Science Instructor      
  Guam Community College  Computer Center                  
  mailto:mikes at kuentos.guam.net                            
  mailto:msetzerii at gmail.com
  http://www.guam.net/home/mikes
  Guam - Where America's Day Begins                        
  G4L Disk Imaging Project maintainer 
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/
+----------------------------------------------------------+

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