Arch Linux

hans wurst

Member

Registered: 2009-01-29

Posts: 2

how to wipe free space ..xfs partition

ive got a 17gig xfs partition where evrything is installed .. 2.2gig are used - rest is free ..
problem is - i wanna backup the whole partition with Acronis TrueImage but it copies the partition in RAW Mode .. meaning .. even though the image gets compressed while creation it ends up being 15gig in size.

now i thought about cleaning up the free space to increase compression greatly but couldnt find a packet like the sFill thingie. pls help coz i need to backup a windowsServer2008 partition and the archXFS partition on a 20gig disk.

thanks in advance ..

kalasmannen

Member

From: Örebro, Sweden

Registered: 2008-02-27

Posts: 39

Website

Re: how to wipe free space ..xfs partition

There is a good livecd that IIRC can do this for you. It's called clonezilla and is based on partimage. You can find it on the URL below.

http://clonezilla.org/

A little quote from their page:

Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS (testing feature provided by partclone). Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.

You might give that one a go.

dschrute

Member

From: NJ, USA

Registered: 2007-04-09

Posts: 183

Re: how to wipe free space ..xfs partition

G4L includes a couple utilities for this...It has blank6 for Windows/Fat/NTFS drives and cleandrive5 and cleandrive6 scripts for Linux.  I've used the blank6 utility and I can confirm that it does help with compression.  I haven't used the Linux scripts, so I can't verify they work, or if they would for XFS, but they may be worth looking at.  Looks like they use dd to write uniform data, then delete it.  Since the data that was written is uniform, it's supposed to allow more efficient compression than any random garbage that may have been hanging around.

For G4L see here :
http://g4l.sourceforge.net/

For some posts about how the cleandriveX scripts help see here :
http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/

hans wurst

Member

Registered: 2009-01-29

Posts: 2

Re: how to wipe free space ..xfs partition

just got the issue fixed by using the server version of the backupsoftware .. 8]

so ppl .. just remember ..if u use windows2008 and xfs for linux.. use the appropriate server software to backup ur system and shit..
money means evrything ...

OrionFyre

Member

Registered: 2008-03-16

Posts: 68

Re: how to wipe free space ..xfs partition

To quickly fill up large sections of empty space you can...assuming the partition is mounted of course

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/partition/zerofill.tmp & rm /path/to/partition/zerofill.tmp

It won't zero out the padding on partial sectors but a vast majority of the free space will be wiped.