[vox-tech] Utility to image a hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Alex Mandel (tech_dev at wildintellect.com):

> For those of us not blessed with the gift of CLI....

...there's a neat little thing called xterm (and kin), a brand-new
invention as of only a few decades ago.  Gives you nice little bash
prompts, as many of them as you want, in a pretty little graphical
window.

> commands like rsync can be a little rough to get the hang of...

If you can't remember "rsync -avz source destination", you have much
bigger problems.  ;->

> ...and in the case of backup --exclude=PATTERN is actually a must
> unless you've got unlimited space.

Well, that depends on what you're copying, doesn't it?  I'm usually 
copying an entire directory tree, or an entire filesystem.

> And since we're not blessed by the CLI gods the PATTERN matching isn't
> that straightforward either.

If you can't figure out * and ?, which is generally all you need (and
should be familiar at least to old fogies from DOS, which borrowed them 
and slightly screwed them up), you have _much_ bigger problems.

> Also we're talking recursing into many nested subdirectories and from
> several different places on the origin disk. It can easily add up to a
> page of different rsync commands.

Then, you put each of them in a series of consecutive lines, store that
as a file, and run it as a script.  Right?  I mean, pretty much like DOS
batch files.  A to-do list for the shell.

> Then you run into the debate about versions, and whether to only keep
> one version.  Simple backup makes it easy to do progressive backups, 1
> per year(older than 1 year), 1 per month, 1 per week for current month
> and it manages it all for you. In reality it's a gui to a bunch of cron
> rsync commands.

Yes, having canned software make decisions for you rather than needing
to think is indeed easier.

> Which brings up the idea that some stuff may be under version control
> and you want to skip those folder as the backup of the repository is
> more useful.

That would be the exclude options, which personally I don't bother to
remember and look up when I need them.

> I could go on, but I think I've said enough,

Absolutely, please do feel welcome to proceed, if you feel you have
things to get off your chest.