If you ever wanted to freeze the state of your Linux server, so that you can replicate it and have an exact copy running up in a matter of minutes, FSArchiver will help you do so! As with all good tools, FSArchiver is also free and open source.
FSArchiver is a tool that allows you to save the contents of a file-system to a compressed archive file. It supports lzo, gzip, bzip2, lzma compression algorithms. By compressed archive, not only does it compress all the contents, but it does so by preserving all the standard file attributes like file permissions, file timestamps, symbolic-links, hard-links, extended-attributes, etc.
FSArchive has the following features:
* Support for basic file attributes (permissions, owner, …)
* Support for multiple file-systems per archive
* Support for extended attributes (they are used by SELinux)
* Support the basic file-system attributes (label, uuid, block-size) for all linux file-systems
* Support for NTFS file systems (ability to create flexible clones of windows partitions)
* Checksum of everything which is written in the archive (headers, data blocks, whole files)
* Ability to restore an archive which is corrupt (it will just skip the current file)
* Multi-threaded lzo, gzip, bzip2, lzma compression: if you have a dual-core / quad-core it will use all the power of your cpu
* Lzma compression (slow but very efficient algorithm) to make your archive smaller.
* Support for splitting large archives into several files with a fixed maximum size
* Encryption of the archive using a password. Based on blowfish from libcrypto from openssl.
Now, since it does not work on file system blocks level, you can replicate a backup the complete file system onto another drive with a size less that the archive! It has support for the built-in libgcrypt library. It can extract an archive to a partition which is smaller that the original one as long as there is enough space to store the data! It FSArchive also has support for NTFS file systems. It employs two levels of checksums to protect data against corruption.
It does have some limitations too. They are:
* It cannot preserve file system attributes that are very specific. (eg. btrfs volumes)
* It archives best only when it makes backups of partitions which are not mounted or mounted read-only.
Download FSArchiver version 0.67 here.
Searches leading to this post:fsarchiver tutorial, fsarchiver ntfs, fsarchiver windows, fsarchiver howto, fsarchiver livecd, fsarchiver live cd, FSArchiver, backup windows fsarchiver, fsarchiver windows tutorial, header fsarchiver skipping, FSArchiver Win32, fsarchiver tutotial, FSArchiver Tutorial DVD archive, fsarchiver to dvd, FSArchiver smaller partition, fsarchiver save to ntfs, fsarchiver save to network, fsarchiver restore, FSArchiver new hard drive, fsarchiver example
You must log in to post a comment.