Dump and restore for Windows partitions

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 09:18:53AM -0500, Martin Boulianne wrote:
> Hi,
> Maybe this is a dumb question, but I was wondering if I could use
> dump (and restore) on Windows NTFS partitions.
> 
> Say I have a NTFS partition, ad0s1. Could I use:
>    # dump -b 4 -f /backups/winxp.dump /dev/ad0s1

Dump is only suited for FreeBSD's native UFS filesystem.
 
> Or after a restore, Windows would be able to read the files? What about dd,
> with something like:
>    # dd if=/dev/ad0s1 of=/backups/winxp.bck bs=4k

This should work, I think. But it will take up a lot of space, because
it will copy the every sector (even unused ones).

Unless there are special features of NTFS that you use, you could mount
the volume, and make a backup with zip(1) or tar(1). Note that with this method
you will probably lose any NTFS attributes. 

The port sysutils/ntfsprogs contains programs like ntfsclone and
ntfscp. Maybe those can be of use? 

Probably the best tool to completely backup an NTFS partition is a
windows-based tool.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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