Re: tar whole windows partition

From: John Thompson (john_at_starfleet.os2.dhs.org)
Date: 05/11/04 

Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 19:02:54 GMT

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On 2004-05-11, joe haydn <nospam@nospam.com> wrote:

> As a way to backup (clone) the whole Windows XP partition, would it
> be possible to use linux dual boot and use tar to archive the whole windows
> partition (ntfs) file system?
>
> Would it cause major problems because of the permission schemes are
> different betwoeen the two operating systems? If so, has anyone tried with
> Windows 98/ME with FAT?

Tar may not be the best solution for backing up a "foreign" filesystem
like NTFS. NTFS support in linux is still characterized as "experiemental"
particularly if you intend to write to an NTFS filesystem.

You may have better luck with a disk image program such as "partimage"
(http://www.partimage.org/). A disk image program will not suffer from
filesystem-specific issues, since it makes a bit-by-bit copy of the
filesystem. The disadvantage of a disk image program is that it will also
copy all the cruft (deleted files, filesystem errors, etc.) into the image
and they will re-created when you restore the filesystem from the image.
For this reason, image backups also tend to be larger than filesystem
backups, but compression of the image file can reduce much of that type of
thing. 

-- 
-John (john@os2.dhs.org)

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