(I’m a n00b, please correct me if I’m wrong)!
- Generally the terminology may be a bit confusing, let me try (also see wikipedia):
(A
disk)
Image is thought a 1:1 copy of a drive into a (usually) single file. Used and unused space is taken sector by sector, regardless of garbage, including deleted stuff, ready to recover files, photos, emails, likely your life from that image.
- That’s the best way to “catch it all” (and to waste space and time) although we should probably talk about free space.
Some SW will have an option to spare unused space, but that’s not very common (?) and not helpful in case you are searching for lost / deleted data.
Example (
@Drugwash): Linux
Disks will write a 1TB drive into one single 1TB image file, there is no option to exclude unused space, no option to segment into 4GB files.
The image file probably can be mounted (Disk Image Mounter, but
doesn’t mount ntfs partitions inside an image - ?) and checked.
- Here FoxClone “fails” because of standing on it’s own foot:
Permission denied.
Good luck (e.g. with restore) if the (single) 1TB img file got corrupted later, or immediately when taking the image because of a failing drive.
With suspicious drives: Take at least two!
Verify means to compare the saved file(s) with the source. That’s better than nothing, but only half of the cake.
The only way to confirm success is
writing back and to check/boot. Be brave!
Backup in terms of Foxclone means to
copy sectors of used space of a drive / partitions into separated files. To know what is “used” it (Ubuntu 18.4) has to understand the filesystem (not the files themselves). If it can’t, FoxClone will write a
1:1 full sector copy of that partition into the saved partition’s file (e.g. with Winwoes recovery/OEM/… partitions).
- With FoxClone the first MB is always saved 1:1 as a “Date.grub” file, containing the boot sector and partition table, probably very handy in case of MSDOS drives (don’t know much regarding GPT).
FoxClone writes one .img file per partition, that may be an advantage in case of disaster.
As a default (option) any partition file is Gzipped to save even more space,
but that may be dangerous:
“wrong pwd”
== “This is not a valid Gzip-file”, difficult if not impossible to “repair”.
At each backup FoxClone writes a couple of files, simple and useful, kudos, see the docs.
But:
Always read the log files after a backup,
success at FoxClone means
successfully written into the log files!
Restore means to write saved files back to a drive.
As a safety measure, FoxClone will only “Recover” to the very same drive the backup was taken from:
A n00b’s drive mismatch will not destroy innocent drives (Disks will!
)
- Contrary to Disks one can’t use “FoxClone - Recover” to move stuff to a new drive.
Clone is the (not only FoxClone) function to ‘restore’ to different drives (of same size or bigger), either directly (drive to drive) or from backup files to drive.
E.g.
@Drugwash, having a MSDOS (MBR) source drive, could have easily used FoxClone to backup only the first partition (the first MB, containing boot sector and PT, is automatically saved as .grub) and use “Clone from file” instead of “Recover” to write it to a new drive.
- The other source partitions would have been created but without FS and empty.
Of course the target drive must have space for all of his
3 source partitions.
- Otherwise the .sfdisk file would have to be # edited …
The beauty of FoxClone is it’s simple design!
My take:
- fstab, grub repair and partition size are issues separated from backup / clone.
- Extended partitions, UEFI and GPT add more burden to a “one fits all” solution.
- Before going into expert mode, FoxClone should proceed on it’s way to a simple, foolproof (n00b) tool.
AndyMH wrote: ⤴Sun May 24, 2020 12:32 pm
Subject to bugs being found, the next major thing I must do with foxclone is figure out a way to verify backup images.
Hmmm …
I’d prefer to compare a second backup (on other drive) to the first one: Safety first.
Only then try to restore!