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