CloneIt Backup Compression
====================================================================

I really love this software, however is there a way you could make it
smarter about empty space on a drive?  For example, the backup files are
much larger than the actually amount of data on the device being backed
up.

Just a suggestion.

Thanks again for your hard work.

B. J. Zolp


---------------------------


BJ,

thanks that you find it useful.

Since the tool copys a complete device bit-by-bit without knowing what's
on it (OS independent), I cannot do anything about unused file space.
CloneIt does not know about files or what's on the disk.

But CloneIt does use gzip compression which should reduce the size of
"zero-data" quite well. A disk that has been used for a while will not
contain much blank space anymore. A quick way to create "zeros" on the
unused disk space on a Unix box would be this shell program:

# How many GigaBytes to "zero"?
c=10
while [ $c != 0 ]; do
 dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy$c bs=1M count=1024
 c=$[c-1];
done
sync
rm -f dummy*
sync

On a windows box a simple C program that writes zeros should be able to
do the same.

Hope that helps - if it does, send me an email and I'll quote this shell
script on the website.

Ciao
Andreas

--------------------

Thanks, I used the script on a Linux box and it reduced my image size 4
fold.  Definately something I would suggest to put on the web page.

B. J. Zolp