Am 07.06.2009 um 18:22 schrieb Niki Kovacs:
Hi,
I'm currently experimenting with G4U (Ghost for Unix), a small cloning application sending disk images to an FTP server.
The application reads the whole disk bit by bit, compresses it and then stores it remotely. Due to this approach, it's more or less filesystem-independent. The drawback is that it sometimes results in huge image files.
Now I'm currently following a hint which suggests to fill the disks' unused space with zero bits. Here's the command for that:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/0bits bs=20M # rm /0bits
This will create a file that fills up the root-partition. If you have multiple partitions beyond that, it's not of much use. Ideally, the zero'ing of the disk should take place before the OS is installed, via a boot-cd and using dd with the disk-device itself
All this made some sense when disks didn't come in sizes of 250GB upwards... If you get 20MB/s from your dd(1), it would take 1000 seconds to fill 20 GB...
Rainer