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fdupoux / fsarchiver

file system archiver for linux
http://www.fsarchiver.org
GNU General Public License v2.0
249 stars 41 forks source link

[question] What part of the root FS does fsarchive backs up? #144

Open rado84-github opened 7 months ago

rado84-github commented 7 months ago

I can't find a forum for the program, so I'll have to ask here.

I read fsarchiver backs up the root fs but it isn't clear what part of it it stores. If I install fsarchiver in a live environment (meaning that my OS won't be running at the time) and start it, will it archive THE WHOLE root fs, like clonezilla does? I'm looking for a tool that creates a backup of only the occupied space of a storage and since my /home, root and grub are on the same single partition (see the screenshot, if you don't understand what I mean), I'm hoping that fsarchiver will make a full backup of my whole system without missing any files. It turned out that clonezilla has its own problems, so I'm looking around for something else to replace clonezilla with.

Picture_created_09-12-2023_20-05-07

babiulep commented 6 months ago

If you would do something like: fsarchiver savefs my_clone.fsa /dev/sdc1 you would have all the files for your system. Of course you can use compression and multiple cores...

Afterwards you can check with fsarchiver archinfo my_clone.fsa the space used (ca. 24.5 GiB) and the original filesystem size (ca. 238.5 GiB)

vorwd commented 2 months ago

So, you want to take a partition that is (example): 250GiB total, 25GiB used and end up with a backup file that is 25GiB in size (uncompressed) correct?

fsarchiver does what I've said above. I've taken a 120GiB drive, with 8GiB used and did a savefs command from fsarchiver, and then took that 8GiB save and restored it onto a different 32GiB EMMC drive in another machine.