On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 08:01 -0700, David Spake wrote:
I know there are several utilities whereby you could actually mount the backup image as a complete drive. Can't say that I've used any of them as most of our stuff is NTFS related (thus we use NTFSClone). At any rate, I know that several of the utilities mentioned in crash3m's post stated the possibility of mounting the backup image as a full 'drive'. Hate to think of the access speed on a DVD+R/W, but it might be something to consider for immediate quick access.
Yes, squashfs implements this for Linux. However, since no file systems available for any consumer-level operating systems implement large multi-file atomic copy operations, a safe backup this way can only be made from an initramfs or some other way of accessing the backup target while it is mounted read-only.