On Mon, 2005-06-13 at 13:10 -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
Ghost, at least Symantec Ghost 8.0, does not do a generic sector by sector copy on an ext2/3 filesystem, it copies file by file, even when cloning whole disks (so that it doesn't copy blank space).
Don't confuse "generic sector-by-sector" with "filesystem block-by- block." _Huge_ difference.
Pretty much these programs (Ghost, Drive Copy/Image) use the _same_ approach. They _always_ copy, _generically_, sector-by-sector -- very fast, very direct. They use "filesystem-specific modules" to identify the used space as well as modify filesystem meta-data for moving/resizing.
Traditional archive programs use intelligent filesystem block-by-block access. Dump programs do similar, but at a lower, filesystem-specific level. But both are typically going to be slower -- especially traditional archiving.