What about putting the new image on it's own partition and make it an append only partition?<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 9:11 AM, JK <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jknapka@kneuro.net">jknapka@kneuro.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Hi everyone,<br>
<br>
ddrescue kicks a*s -- it imaged all but about 20MB of my 80GB failed<br>
HFS partition successfully. I then made a copy of the image so as to<br>
have a backup in case I hosed the original (via fsck or simple<br>
dumbness on my part). Making the backup took about 5 hours, which<br>
kinda sucked; and if I *do* need to revert to the backup image,<br>
copying for another 5 hours is not an appealing prospect. What I'd<br>
really like is a way to tell the Linux kernel: "Please treat this<br>
file as copy-on-write -- if I write something to it, allocate a new<br>
on-disk block to hold the written data, splice that block into the<br>
file, and leave the original alone." That way, going back to the<br>
clean image would merely be a matter of throwing away the COW blocks,<br>
instead of waiting another 5 hours to copy my backup image.<br>
<br>
Surely such magic is already available somehow? I know there are some<br>
distros that implement "writable" CDROM filesystems in a similar<br>
way, by using specialized COW filesystems, but that isn't exactly<br>
what I want. I want to either<br>
(a) set up COW for a single file on an EXT3 FS, or else<br>
(b) mount the disk image as an HFS+ volume, in such a way that writes<br>
will not alter the image itself.<br>
<br>
(BTW I found the ext3cow FS, which would work, but something less<br>
intrusive would be awfully nice.)<br>
<br>
TIA,<br>
<br>
-- JK<br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations<br>
it is incapable of solving approaches zero. -- V, Order of the Stick<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>-- <br>James P. Kinney III<br>Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness <br><br>