I created yesterday a drive image using GZip.
I opened the 51.3 GiB file named ssd.img.gz to see one icon thats a package of 3.9 GiB, yes, thats THree point Nine Gigabytes in size and has the name of the image as ssd.img
That does not seem right to me, has the image creation worked or not?
Yes the drives have data and an operating system on it.
Should I have used cat
instead? only I did and it kept on saying that it had nothing to do.
Would using the | zip
instead be a better option?
** EDIT **
The command used was:
mark@zotac:~$ sudo -l
Enter password:<entered password to get in to root>
root@zotac:~# dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -c > "/media/mark/Seagate External Drive/ssd.img.gz
the terminal spent the best part of 10 Hours at building the image, something in itself that I also found suspect, why so log when copying the files to a folder that I wanted, some 40GiB took 45 minutes...
The source drive /dev/sda
had no mounted partitions.
** EDIT **
Just to clarify, I am trying to make an image of the drive to back up later if things go wrong with a repair, the drive itself needs to be a file on a drive as the target drive partition is using almost all of the drive, the partitions can't be resized on it without formatting it and I am not about to lose 1.4TB of data.
So the dd if=/dev/sda of=/<target>
isn't what I need, what I do need is an image of the drive that I can restore the image from to the drive should the repair go wrong.
So what command do I use, dd or cat? Why does | zip
keep telling me it has nothing to do when used with cat but no error or warning with dd
zcat ssd.img.gz | wc -c
return? – David Foerster Mar 02 '15 at 12:31ls -l
? – Rmano Mar 03 '15 at 13:32ls -l
can tell me the unpacked size of compressed files? – David Foerster Mar 03 '15 at 21:21