Bug 1065847 - Feature Request: Hook into filesystem utilities rather than block device
Summary: Feature Request: Hook into filesystem utilities rather than block device
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED EOL
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: gnome-disk-utility
Version: 22
Hardware: All
OS: All
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: David King
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2014-02-17 06:22 UTC by Eric Griffith
Modified: 2016-07-19 11:01 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2016-07-19 11:01:12 UTC
Type: Bug
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Eric Griffith 2014-02-17 06:22:24 UTC
Description of problem:


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:


Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Actual results:


Expected results:


Additional info:

Comment 1 Eric Griffith 2014-02-17 06:41:51 UTC
Apologies about the double post, Firefox seems to have lagged and created a bit of a mess. 

Situation: I work in a computer shop, whenever we need to image a drive whether to create a backup, restore from a backup, or clone from one to another, we use Acronis True Image.

While Acronis works perfectly fine, it does not do exactly what I had in mind and in search of something that WOULD I stumbled upon Gnome Disk's "Create Disk Image" "Restore From Disk Image" features, unfortunately it did not work exactly as I intended. 

Acronis takes a snapshot of the partition table, mbr and then the actual partitions. In the disk image the only thing included is the actual data ON the filesystem. For example if you have a 320GB drive, but only 80GBs are used (as I do) then the image will only be about 80GB at most, probably less since it seems to do some compression. 

If I then try to restore from said image and tell it to do "automatic" it will make the new disk appear exactly as the old one did, deleting as many partitions as needed to make the layout exactly as before (though not necessarily the same sizes.) 

By that I mean if I take a standard windows 7 install and image it with Acronis, it will have a 100MB "System Reserved" partition, and the rest of the drive say 320GB NTFS partition for the OS and data, with 80GB's used. The image will be equal to less than 80GB's since thats whats taken up.

If I then take that image and tell Acronis to restore a 160GB drive from said image it will, and tell it to do so automatically, it will delete all partitions on the drive, create a 100MB "System Reserved" partition, and then the remaining space will be taken up by an NTFS partition filled with the same data as before. 

Acronis doesn't care that the new drive is smaller, just as long as there's enough room for the data. Just as it doesnt care if the new drive is bigger, it will automatically grow the OS partition to fill the space.


Compare this to Gnome disks which when I told it to image the drive it wanted to create a 320GB block by block copy image. If I tried to restore that image to a smaller drive it would likely fail after filling what it could, likely leaving the drive in a fairly inconsistent and random state. 

So far I have yet to find a single linux-native utility that creates so called "Sparse images" (correct me if that is the right term) like Acronis does, not partimage, not partclone, not clonezilla, nothing. Every single utility wastefully does a block by block copy, not a single one hooks into the filesystem to try and figure out what is actually free vs used space. 

Given Gnome's recent push towards sane, user friendly defaults I hope that we as a community could correct this severely lacking area of the Linux Desktop and get a solid, native disk image and backup utility.

Comment 2 Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client 2014-02-17 15:36:27 UTC
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning to the new owner of this component.

Comment 3 Fedora Admin XMLRPC Client 2014-07-01 12:17:51 UTC
This package has changed ownership in the Fedora Package Database.  Reassigning to the new owner of this component.

Comment 4 Jaroslav Reznik 2015-03-03 15:29:42 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 22 development cycle.
Changing version to '22'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Program_Management/HouseKeeping/Fedora22

Comment 5 Fedora End Of Life 2016-07-19 11:01:12 UTC
Fedora 22 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2016-07-19. Fedora 22 is
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of
Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you
are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the
current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this
bug.

Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.


Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.