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## 3. Partimage vs others

## 3.1 What does partimage give you over the following: clear the free blocks with DD, and copy with DD

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/filetmp ; rm /mnt/filetmp ; dd if=/dev/xxx | gzip > image_file.gz

- 1. Partimage is faster. You don't have to wait for "dd if=/dev/zero" first. during the copy, free blocks are not read. Then, if 20 % of the partition is used, partimage will avoid two access to 80 % of the free areas.
- 2. There's a GUI (graphical user interface). It has a lot of advantages: you can see the remaining time, the percentage of the copy, ... The Qt GUI in the next version will be very nice and easy to use.
- 3. Partimage can work on file systems which are not supported (stable write support) by the Linux kernel, such as NTFS, BSD FFS, XFS/JFS in a non-patched kernel. To run "dd if=/dev/zero", you need the write support in Linux.
- 4. Partimage is made to be easy to use, and to replace commercial software such as Ghost, Drive Image, ... and the user does not have to know many command lines.
- 5. Partimage has a lot of options, such as -V which allow th create a new volume if space is missing. DD will show and error and abort.
- 6. The network support allows to save an image file from a client, without having to configure both client and server NFS. (Network File System). When the multicast will be implemented, it will allow to restore X clients from 1 server, and DD can't do a such multicast copy.
- 7. We provide root disk and bootcd. You can boot on it, if Linux is not installed on your computer. They contains everything that is need (the LZO compression in 0.7, which is very useful for big files). You don't have all these tools on every boot rescue systems.

## 3.2 Any hope of a browser like utility to allow restoring individual files from the archives? Like Ghost Explorer?

Sorry, Partition Image is not a high level program, like Ghost. Ghost makes a file copy, and we obtain a file in a tar.gz archive, with other details (such as the boot sector). But Partimage works at a low level, as Drive Image: it copies used blocks of the disk. So, it doesn't know where files are written, and cannot allow to see files in the image without restoring. But maybe it will become possible in future versions. We will try to make partimage image files mountable: a driver, such as the loop one, could allow us to make an image file be a block device. If you know how to write block device drivers, please contact us.

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