TeraByte Unlimited

Here do be an oddity and I must confess to being befuddled. Part of this is a brain dump because writing these things down helps me thing.

I have an HP z820. 20-core with 128GB of RAM. There are 2 CPU having 10-core each. I have a 1TB SSD boot drive; 6TB WD Black spinning disk; 2TB WD Blue spinning disk. There are two different built in disk controllers. One is an LSI SAS 2308 RAID controller that loads its firmware from some burnt EPROM thing for security purposes. All 8 connectors for it are 6Gb/s. Second controller is Intel C600 PCH and is "just there." Provides four 3 Gb/s ports and 2 6Gb/s ports.

I have a really nice 4TB drive in external enclosure connected via USB 3.x cable on USB 3.x port out back. This is my backup target.

The OS on there is currently openSuSE Leap 15.6 but that should be irrelevant. Boot is very fast once the BIOS gets done loading its LSI firmware.

Right now the two spinning drives have just over half the data the SSD has. Backing up the SSD is over 40 minutes. Both the spinning disks are under 5 minutes. I swapped out the Samsung EVO 840 today for some brand new latest and greatest SSD thinking the 840 is older tech (which it is) and might be the problem. I'm over an hour into the restore and it says I still have over an hour to go.

Just for grins, before I got this far I stuck in a 1TB WD Blue spinning disk and the restore to it was going at the same pace. I was willing to believe there was an issue with the drivers being loaded for "vintage" controllers.

While typing this I looked over at the display and noticed the total restore is 801.something GB. There is no where near that on the drive.

Does Drive Image have a no-likey situation going on with whatever the disk/partition format is that openSuSE uses by default?

I can understand now, if that is the case. I've had success with Drive Image for so long I never considered it was backing up every block on the drive because it couldn't handle the partition format. Really need to use Leap on that machine though. Would seriously hate to have to wipe and re-install trying to force SuSE to use a different partition type.

Oh, Image for Linux 4.01.

The openSUSE default file system for the root partition is Btrfs. The default file system for additional partitions is XFS.

According to the Image for Linux Manual...

Linux operating environment but can back up a hard disk containing any type of
operating system. Image for Linux protects your system by creating a compressed
or uncompressed “snapshot” of all used areas of your FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2/3/4,
ReiserFS, or HSF+ partition or volume. For other file systems, it saves and restores
a compressed or uncompressed snapshot of all sectors in the partition or volume,
both used and unused areas.

Opensuse is not a problem (any bootable stick version of Terabyte's Image For ... will work just fine on a mixed system.)

ignore: 1) are you booting to IFL (Image For Linux)? ( see "yes, though 4.01, might upgrade to 4.02 sometime but that won't make any difference here - I started on 3.x ! )
ignore: 2) (so I assume you have windows somewhere so that Terabyte could create that? yes?

start here:
3)grab your camera as we need to know what steps you are taking and what IFL choices (please use default) you are making, and take a picture of each IFL step.
Answer will be easy, I assure you.
On camera Use very low res or the size will be too large for this forum site to post. (or use gimp to resize down if necessary.)
(I use IFL stick on a mixed linux/win nvme ssd that has about 400GB out of 1TB occupied by 11 partitions with about 105GB of actual data on those partitions. IFL backs up that data to about 87GB on my backup drive.)

No need for cameras or videos...

As the Image for Linux Manual states, unsupported file systems (Btrfs and XFS in this case) will be backed up...and will include both used and unused areas.

When that is the case, the process will be slower...and the image size will be larger than expected.

XFS is supported for data only, Btrfs data only is also supported in V4 (if single drive and not RAIDed/spread out). You can tell by details of partitions to see the free/used space, if none shown, then its sector by sector.

I put a series of 18 pics of using IFL as a full backup:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Should be accessible. if not let me know.

TeraByte Support wrote: Sun Aug 25, 2024 12:50 am XFS is supported for data only, Btrfs data only is also supported in V4 (if single drive and not RAIDed/spread out). You can tell by details of partitions to see the free/used space, if none shown, then its sector by sector.

Yep, those are the default file systems for openSUSE...however, it's not apparent from reading the IFL Manual that they are "supported" for used areas only...

Image for Linux protects your system by creating a compressed or uncompressed “snapshot” of all used areas of your FAT, FAT32, NTFS, Ext2/3/4,
ReiserFS, or HSF+ partition or volume. For other file systems, it saves and restores a compressed or uncompressed snapshot of all sectors in the partition or volume, both used and unused areas.

You guys might update the docs if that's the case.

kris455 wrote: Sun Aug 25, 2024 2:46 am

Yeah, because I searched the site for Btrfs and the only two mentions were for BootIt. I thought Btrfs and openSuSE support got fixed some time ago. Yes, it is 4.x.

I had to move openSuSE Leap 15.6 to a VM instead of actual metal. Really needed actual metal though. I'm a professional, not an Agile developer. Switched that machine to Manjaro Cinnamon for metal development. Going to have to cross my fingers and hold my breath that Leap 15.6 works the same in a VM as on metal. VM testing almost never matches metal testing though.

Thanks for getting back to me.

Somehow I thought when you posted a question this forum auto-subscribed you and sent email for each reply.

seasoned_geek wrote: Sun Aug 25, 2024 9:31 pm

kris455 wrote: Sun Aug 25, 2024 2:46 am

Yeah, because I searched the site for Btrfs and the only two mentions were for BootIt. I thought Btrfs and openSuSE support got fixed some time ago. Yes, it is 4.x.

I had to move openSuSE Leap 15.6 to a VM instead of actual metal. Really needed actual metal though. I'm a professional, not an Agile developer. Switched that machine to Manjaro Cinnamon for metal development. Going to have to cross my fingers and hold my breath that Leap 15.6 works the same in a VM as on metal. VM testing almost never matches metal testing though.

Thanks for getting back to me.

Somehow I thought when you posted a question this forum auto-subscribed you and sent email for each reply.

VM vs metal - yep, sorta,sometimes... email for reply has only worked for me in one thread - settings in logon name/User Control panel/Board pref, Edit Notifications - I finally just checked everything. Maybe it takes a while to get going.