[sclug] Snapshot disk images

[John Stumbles]

[confession: thread hijack :-)]

On 26/07/11 22:35, David Given wrote:

> On 07/26/11 19:17, John Stumbles wrote:
> [...]
>> Neat. Is there anything like this for ext2/ext3 filesystems?
>
> I think the semantic equivalent for those is dump / restore, although
> they don't create disk images. Never used them, though.

Actually what I really need is to be able to make a series of disk 
images without duplicating data.

After I pantsed up my old Debian installation and had to 'upgrade' to 
the current version and its dysfunctional kde-bloody-4 steaming POS I 
realised that giving up 10G of backup space for a restorable image of 
the OS partition would not have been a bad thing.

Since then whilst rebuilding my system I've done a dd disk image at 
various points along the way so I wouldn't have to rebuild the system 
from scratch again. But of course that's another 10G for each snapshot 
whereas an intelligent system would only add space taken by the 
differences. I guess a suitable bit of rsync magic might do that for me, 
but wondered if there is something already rolled.

-- 
John Stumbles                                       http://yaph.org.uk
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