
Name and shame
typo-squatters' ransom
Who are they?
Version 2.4 of Rescuezilla - which describes itself as the "Swiss Army Knife of System Recovery," - is here and based on Ubuntu 22.04. Rescuezilla is a fork and continuation of the Redo Backup and Recovery project. "Redo" went quiet after 2012, with no new releases until 2020. So, in 2019, the developers behind Rescuezilla …
-> although NetBSD is admittedly niche, we thought it might handle a BSD FFS volume
I don't have an installation to hand to test this, but I seem to recall that NetBSD uses the older UFS v1 (or just UFS) version of UFS. I am sure (fairly sure, willing to put £5 on it) that Linux does have support for this using the -o option.
I tested a Linux Mint installation with a NetBSD formatted disk. It can mount it without problems:
# mount -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/sdb1 /tmp/a
mount: /tmp/a: WARNING: device write-protected, mounted read-only.
# mount |grep sdb1
/dev/sdb1 on /tmp/a type ufs (ro,relatime,ufstype=ufs2,onerror=lock)
So I am surprised that Rescuezilla cannot handle it.
That's a different question, but it's a valid point.
I have had great success with 2 different tools for dying disks: dd_rescue and gddrescue.
The snag with DDing a disk is that the result is a raw file, it copies everything including empty blocks, and you need a destination as big as the source.
Which is why tools like partclone and things exist: they understand the filesystems they are copying, so they only copy allocated blocks, which can be much quicker, and they can compress their output, meaning that modern PCs with terabyte-class disks, usually largely empty, don't need multi-terabyte storage to hold the output.
It's not _essential_ but it makes life easier.
Thus Clonezilla, which works but is hard, and in turn thus RedoRescue, but that was moribund for 6 years when Rescuezilla revived it.
you lost me here...
RedoRescue and Rescuezilla -- do they just do block-image binary clones of the entire disk (like dd), or are they file-system aware?
i.e., I have a 500GB disk. There's 100GB of data on it, 400G of empty file system...if I clone the disk using RedoRescue or Rescuezilla or Clonezilla, for that matter -- is my image file 500GB or 100GB in size?
They use various tools, with various compression options, from quick-but-not-very-efficient to slow-but-highly-efficient.
Yes, they are FS aware. Yes, they can make bit-exact clones. No, they do not use `dd`.
Depending on the contents of your disk, your backup of 100GB of OS and apps might take 50GB. OTOH if it is mostly JPGs and MP3s, which are already compressed, it might take 95GB.
dd_rescue should be an easily accessed menu option on things like this. I tried using clonezilla recently with a drive containing a couple of bad blocks. clonezilla's main UI method spent ages analysing things then failed. dd_rescue (which is on the clonezilla disk but needs to be used in the command line) just got on with it almost instantly and got me a bootable copy with all the required data intact.
In the WinXP days Hirens boot disk became a must have CD to keep in the desk draw (next to 3 micro USB cables of undetermined functionality, old bluetack, several bulldog clips and that proprietary cable for a device you've long since lost).
Saved a number of PC's from various issues and even viruses over the years, and it's good to see its been updated for modern windows.
Teacher icon, because every day is a school day.
I have seen this word "draw" several times in the past and have only just realised that it refers to what I would call a "drawer". As to how this came about, I have wondered if it is an misconceived correction of the mispronounced word "drawr" (like idear etc.).
[The release notes mention an issue with graphics drivers and there should be a version 2.4.1 that fixes this very soon – but saying that, The Reg FOSS desk encountered no problems with it either in a VM or on bare metal]
I will wait then, my video card doesn't play well with some Linux distributions like newer versions of Ubuntu.