Invisible wrote:
>>> In fairness, Ghost does much, much more than dd does. In particular,
>>> Ghost comprehends NTFS, so you can do things like restore to a partition
>>> of a different size, backup only the "used" sectors, etc.
>>
>> Like the many ntfstools? I'm sure there's one that can skip free blocks.
> 
> Are there any that aren't alpha? Every system I've seen for reading NTFS 
> from Linux is either read-only or has a big flashing red disclaimer on 
> it. Ghost was written by people who's signed the NDA and seen the spec 
> for the NTFS filesystem.
> 
>>> And you can browse and modify the backup image on the server without 
>>> having to restore it first.
>>
>> Mount it with a loop device.
> 
> Random, but... why the hell do you need a loopback "device" in the first 
> place? Why can't you just mount (say) an ISO image directly? Requiring a 
> loopback device means that
> 
> 1. there are only a finite number of them available,

Have a look at this document:
   http://www.slax.org/documentation_loop_mount.php

Here's how I understand the situation:

Linux kernels earlier than v. 2.6.23 had 8 loop devices, unless you specified more
Linux kernel v. 2.6.23 had 256 loop devices
Linux kernel v. 2.6.24 and later does not have these limitations


> 2. before you can mount anything loopback, you have to determine which 
> device numbers (if any) are free.

Just try this:

   mount -o loop,offset=somenumberofbytes ~/sda.img /mnt/sda1

 From the mount manual:

mount will try to find some unused loop device and use that."

-- 
Tor Olav
http://subcube.com

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