Disk imaging/cloning [free] software that works with RAID0 of Z11/Z12?

Are there any?

I've been using Clonezilla so far, but it doesn't seem to work well for a RAID0'ed Z122GX with 2x 64 GB SSDs (at least not with default settings, perhaps it is possible to make it work w/ some adjustments?).

Any suggestions please?

More specifically, I'm looking something that you can boot live off a USB or CD (i.e. so that it doesn't require a working installation of an OS), can backup/restore disk/partitions, and I prefer free if possible. =P

 

I haven't found one yet.
Macrium Reflex is due an update which will reportedly be able to handle raid0, but I have had mixed results with it, even on a non-raid setup.

 

I still use the good old DOS based GHOST 11. Works just fine on RAID volumes.

 

How about this?

(from the top of my head, so check first please!)

Code:

# dd if=/dev/sda | gzip --fast -c > /my_mounted_share/sda.img.gz

and repeat for sdb, sdc and sdd...

Ran from an USB key with Ubuntu Server 10.04 installed to it (don't forget the 'nomodeset' kernel option). My default Sony install was 8.5GB per disk image, transferred quite quick over samba / Gbit LAN.

 

Just checked, I had remembered it correct.
You can restore a disk image with:

Code:

# gunzip -c /my_mounted_share/sda.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sda

 

Thanks StefanHamminga.

I understand that dd copies the entire drive, including MBR, partition tables, etc., correct?

 

"Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 Desktop Edition"[*] is an option. It lets you image the disk from a running system, won't back up unused clusters (like dd does), and you can very easily create a custom restore CD that will include the file system and network drivers you have on your booted system. It does incrementals too, so the next time you run it, it will only image the clusters that have changed.
BESR2010 also lets you restore individual files from an image (unlike dd).

[*]: Is there a prize to be won for longest product name?

 

Does it restore to a raid drive? In my experience most don't work.

 

Bit for bit. You can actually clone the MBR, partition layout, etc, whatever you want... I used Gzip, but if you don't you can actually view the raw image data and compare it to the disk raw data.

You should test it in a VM first if you want to play with it, you need it anyway to create a Linux USB key (you can use a live image, but if you just install Linux to a usb key you can install everything you need... For instance WIFI support which usually is missing from recovery disks).

Other compression options like bzip2 can also be used, but I found Gzip in fast mode performing best when pushing your image over GBit LAN to a Windows share. You can run at least 2 jobs in parallel to almost double performance (I did).

 

BESR2010 does indeed restore to RAID -- when you create a restore disk, the process will find the extra drivers installed on your running system, and add them to the new restore CD.
The main down sides is that it's not free, and that it's Windows only. But then again, I think anyone who spent $2000+ on a machine should be able to pay $60 for imaging software. If not, they should have bought a $1940+ machine

 

Lol. Thanks arth1 for the info. I'll have a look. I have been wary because I had Acronis True Image some time ago and restores did not go well with that.

 

Use "pigz" as a drop-in replacement for gzip. It's written by Mark Adler, the same guy who wrote zlib, and who wrote gzip with Jean-Loup Gailly.
pigz works like gzip, except that it is multithreaded, so it's much faster on multi-core machines.

On my quad core machine:

Code:

$ time cat /bin/* | pigz -9 >/dev/null

real    0m1.155s
user    0m4.462s
sys     0m0.063s

$ time cat /bin/* | gzip -9 >/dev/null

real    0m4.719s
user    0m4.708s
sys     0m0.023s

On a dual-core, you "only" get twice the speed

(Nothing beats lzop for speed, but it doesn't compress all that well. Still useful, because the decompression is so extremely fast -- lzcat (lzop -dc) is generally faster than cat of an uncompressed file!)

 

I actually thought of using that (there is also pbzip), but I went with the different jobs thing because that way you also increase disk read speed... I suppose you could even try to combine both with HT. I didn't look into it that much then I needed a simple quick and dirty cloning solution and this was just that.