What is best for creating a compressed ext4 drive image ?

[Lucap]

What is best for creating a compressed ext4 drive image as i seem to be going around in circles at Google between fsarchiver and Clonezilla?

[austin.texas]

I would vote for fsarchiver. One reason is the fact that it is in the repository, so you can boot any live Mint and install it. That is very convenient.

Then:

• You can use it to take a "snapshot" of your root partition, and then restore the snapshot to the same partition, if things go wrong.
• You can clone your root partition to a different computer easily.
• You can clone your root partition to a different hard drive on the same computer - but only if you delete the original before booting, or else change the UUID of one of the root partitions. The UUID of the cloned partition will be the same as the original.
• FSArchiver copies files, not blocks, so you can restore the filesystem to a partition which is smaller than the original.
• FSArchiver also creates the file-system when it extracts the data to partitions, so you can backup from a btrfs, ntfs, or ext3 partition, and restore to an ext4 partition. Or you can back up an ext4 root partition and restore it to an ntfs partition (which will then be ext4).
• One of the advantages to using FSArchiver is that everything is checksummed in the archive in order to protect the data.
• FSArchiver can create a compressed archive file of a directory, as well as a partition.
• The archive file can be password protected.

http://www.fsarchiver.org/quickstart/

Fsarchiver Tutorial

[Lucap]

Thanks for the detailed post and the links, it sound exactly what i'm looking for.

I've been using symantec ghost suite with Windows for years but their ext4 support is crap.

[Lucap]

That's odd , even though i saved the MBR and then restored it i had to use Gparted to enable the drive boot flag?

Is it because i didn't use the PBR?

[Lucap]

My bad , i made a mistake and had chosen the wrong option.

I didn't notice a drop down for the MBR that said restore both Boot and Partition and after i used that it put the drive back as it was with the boot flag and worked correctly.

I'm impressed , it's very fast.