GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 364324
Filesystem images support
Last modified: 2020-11-13 10:40:47 UTC
I'd like to have the ability to backup a filesystem to an "img" file ... I can see it to be like this; Right click on a partition Advanced >> Make a Backup image then a wizard opens with such steps; -step 1; where do you want to put your img file? there should be a menu containing the filesystems that have enough free space and if the user chose one of them it should be checked for errors and if no errors are there it should be auto mounted then and auoto-umounted after the process finishes ... -step 2; What kind of compression you want to use? (Note to use this feature you must have at least the filesystem double size free space on the filesystem you will put the image on) 1-No compression(Fastest) 2-Low compression 3-Medium compression 4- Best compression within advanced menu that's deactivated by default and when activated it asks; "What kind of compression technology you want to use?" 1-Gzip(Default) 2-Bzip2(Takes much more time but can compress better sometimes) *this feature can be implemented using "e2image" utility for ext2, and ext3 filesystem ... I've no idea whether other file system have such tool or not ... *also there should be a "restore a backup" option .. I hope I could help :)!
I hope someone can reply to this ... and give comments ..
well, i can reply to it, but at this moment i simply don't have the time to implement this. If you need this urgently you could provide a patch against the latest CVS version so we can easily incorporate this in gparted. thanks! :)
Hoping I can do it! ... But as I'm going to start learning programming in C and C++ ... so within few months may I can do it Thanks lot :)
I think I can suggest some other thing regarding this feature ... no problem it won't be implemented soon ... I think maybe compression of the output directly can save much disk space .. what I mean is; If you make an image file which took, for example, 1024 MB then you tried to compress it as a "next" step by gzip ... you will have to have enough disk space for compression ... so at some moment the backup process will need more than 1024 MB .. a range from 1250MB to 2028 MB will be needed approximately ... but what about output redirection? for example; e2image -r /dev/hda1 - | gzip /mnt/hda1.img.gz and the same for bzip2 .... but this currently can only be used with raw images ... and it needs proper testing ... any way it can be an option for those who don't have free double space ... I've tested it a it really does an amazing compression .. that's just incredible!
e2image only copies FS metadata, and leaves the rest of the file filled with zeros, which is why it compressed so well ;) I submitted a patch to e2image yesterday to be able to include all data so that it can be used to clone a filesystem like this. Hopefully once it is released, gparted can be extended to detect and use it when copying partitions to speed things up, and maybe to image to/from image files.
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