In my previous experience, zeroing the disk will result in smaller files for G4U but it will take awhile depending on many factors including the size of the disk, performance, etc.. Also, I recommend giving Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) a try. It offers more options than G4U and is more efficient in my experience. Matt -- Mathew S. McCarrell Clarkson University '10 mccarrms at gmail.com mccarrms at clarkson.edu On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Rainer Duffner <rainer at ultra-secure.de>wrote: > > 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 > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20090607/58f28918/attachment-0004.html>