[CentOS] Question about dd (fill a hard disks' unused space with blanks)

Sun Jun 7 17:13:36 UTC 2009
Nicolas Thierry-Mieg <Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr>

Rainer Duffner 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.

Niki,

I suggest you look at partimage.
G4U seems similar, but partimage doesn't write free blocks to the 
images, so you don't get these huge files.
It's worked well for me.
It's in rpmforge.

cheers,
Nicolas