PartImage

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PartImage is a Linux/UNIX utility which saves partitions in many formats (see below) to an image file. The image file can be compressed in the GZIP/BZIP2 formats to save disk space, and split into multiple files to be copied on removable floppies (ZIP for example), Partitions can be saved across the network since version 0.6.0. Partition Image will only copy data from the used portions of the partition. For speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the image file. This is unlike the 'dd' command, which also copies empty blocks. Partition Image also works for large, very full partitions. For example, a full 1 GB partition can be compressed with gzip down to 400MB.

The NTFS (Windows NT File System) is currently not fully supported: this means you will be able to save an NTFS partition if system files are not very fragmented, and if system files are not compressed. In this case, you will be able to save the partition into an image file, and you will be able to restore it after. If there is a problem when saving, an error message will be shown and you won't be able to continue. If you have successfully saved an NTFS NTFS partition, you shouldn't have problems as you restore it (except in the case of bugs). Then the best way is to try to save a partition to know if it is possible. If not, try to defragment it with diskeeper or another tool, and try to saving the partition again.

PowerPC / iMac is supported: Recent Partimage versions (0.6.0+ and recent 0.7.x) can be used on both intel i386+ and PowerPC architectures! Since there is a PPC version of Linux Mandrake, it's now easy to use Linux under PowerPC. The source code of partimage can be compiled. A static binary version of the executables, and a bootable CD-Rom are also provided to ease the use partimage under iMac.

The advantages of the PartImage program are:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
  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.
• 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.
• We provide rootdisk 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.

The system requirements of PartImage include:

• libz gzip compression support
• libbz2 bzip2 compression support
• liblzo lzo compression support
• libnewt GUI (Graphical User Interface)
• libslang Required for newt
• libssl OpenSSL: encryption of data over the network
• libcrypt support for password