Quick assessment of 3 Windows tools to read/write Linux filesystems on dual-boot desktops

Frank Slootweg wrote:
R.Wieser wrote:
Frank,

I.e. you indeed jumped to some worst-case scenario conclusions,
assuming limitations which don't exist.
Yeah, thats the problem with not having clear information, and having to,
effectivily, make a best-guess effort to what they mean with the few words
they did offer.

As to putting your arm in some big-ass metal press, *reading*
from your partitions and writing the image(s) to a *file* hasn't
quite the same level of danger, has it!? :-)
Even though that wasn't quite what I was talking about, I would not be so
sure about it. Can you imagine anything worse than to think you have
backups, only to discover that when you need them they do not actually work
? Bye-bye to all your own work, family photos, music, etc. , and maybe
even to a slew of passwords forcing you to jump thru all kinds of hoops to
regain access all your swiss bank accounts. Not hat _I_ have any, mind you.
:-)

Another clarification: I don't consider image 'backup' to be real -
i.e. archival type - backup. For me, it's only/mainly for recovery of
the system, not of my data.

People who talk this way, might not be aware that
modern image backups can be mounted like disk drives,
allowing both browsing and random access for
copying out files when needed.

An image backup is every bit as good as "folder copying".

These are things Macrium 6 can do. Macrium 7 removed imgtovhd.exe.

Macrium --- MRIMG ---- (mount like a disk, see it in Disk Management)
+ (uses a service that Macrium installed)
|
+--- imgtovhd.exe ---- .vhd file --- open with 7ZIP
(Macrium) --- "attach VHD" in Disk Management
--- use as a drive in VirtualBox, can
be treated as a data drive

Your data doesn't have to be "trapped".

Paul

In article , Char Jackson
wrote:
What's your method of monitoring for bit rot and repairing it if/when
you find it?

synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only, and Synology
(and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud of their NAS products.

both are very good, but qnap doesn't support btrfs and their software
is a little less polished, although their encryption works better.

btrfs has self-healing files and snapshots, both are *very* useful,
although not all synology nases support btrfs.

Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it should come
populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO. Instead, it's empty.

what's your data worth?

there's no requirement to buy an 8-bay unit unless you have a ****load
of data to back up. a business likely does, but home users rarely do.

a 2-bay unit is reasonably priced, possibly a 4-bay for those who need
higher capacities. fill the bays as needed. 1-bay units exist, but they
don't currently support btrfs.

there are also a ****load of apps available, including virtualization,
docker, several backup options and quite a bit mo
https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/packages
https://synocommunity.com/packages

On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 21:26:48 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Ken Blake
writes:
On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 19:32:20 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:
[]
I think we're all agreed that there are advantages in backing up (in the
widest sense) both system and data.


That depends on who you mean by "we all." If you're talking about
regular posters here in these NGs, yes, you're probably right. But if

Yes, you're right to point out the assumption.

you're talking about computer users in general, I disagree. Most
people don't even realize that there's a danger of losing everything
on their drive and that they should back up anything.

And I've on the whole given up trying to change most of them.


I assume _everyone's_ agreed that data needs to be backed up, since for
almost anyone that involves irreplaceable items: photographs, documents,
and so on.


Again, who do you mean by "everyone"? If you're talking about computer
users in general, I again disagree.

And you're right to.

_Most_ of us also agree that the system (including software) is worth
backing up too. (_Some_ people just say "oh, I'd just reinstall
everything.)

Here's an excerpt from my standard post on backing up:

Should you back up Windows? Should you back up your applications? Most
people will tell you no, since you can always reinstall these easily
from the original media. But I don't think the answer is so clear-cut.
Many people have substantial time and effort invested in customizing
Windows and configuring their apps to work the way they want to.
Putting all of that back the way it was can be a difficult,
time-consuming effort. And you may not be able to find all your
installation media, installation codes etc. Whether you should backup
up Windows and apps depends, once again, on you.

You certainly don't need to convince me.



I know. I only posted that for others here who might need convincing.

Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 02 Oct 2018 15:59:25 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Char Jackson
wrote:

What's your method of monitoring for bit rot and repairing it if/when
you find it?

synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only, and Synology
(and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud of their NAS products.
Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it should come
populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO. Instead, it's empty.

My single-bay Synology DS115J was EUR 89, some USD100. Not really
something to rob a bank for.

A little earlier, I wrote:
Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 02 Oct 2018 15:59:25 -0400, nospam
wrote:

In article , Char Jackson
wrote:

What's your method of monitoring for bit rot and repairing it if/when
you find it?

synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only, and Synology
(and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud of their NAS products.
Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it should come
populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO. Instead, it's empty.

My single-bay Synology DS115J was EUR 89, some USD100. Not really
something to rob a bank for.

Oops! As nospam mentioned the low-end boxes such as my DS115J don't
support btrfs. Cheapest one with btrfs support is the dual-bay DS118 at
about USD200.

Paul wrote:
Frank Slootweg wrote:
R.Wieser wrote:
Frank,

I.e. you indeed jumped to some worst-case scenario conclusions,
assuming limitations which don't exist.
Yeah, thats the problem with not having clear information, and having to,
effectivily, make a best-guess effort to what they mean with the few words
they did offer.

As to putting your arm in some big-ass metal press, *reading*
from your partitions and writing the image(s) to a *file* hasn't
quite the same level of danger, has it!? :-)
Even though that wasn't quite what I was talking about, I would not be so
sure about it. Can you imagine anything worse than to think you have
backups, only to discover that when you need them they do not actually work
? Bye-bye to all your own work, family photos, music, etc. , and maybe
even to a slew of passwords forcing you to jump thru all kinds of hoops to
regain access all your swiss bank accounts. Not hat _I_ have any, mind you.
:-)

Another clarification: I don't consider image 'backup' to be real -
i.e. archival type - backup. For me, it's only/mainly for recovery of
the system, not of my data.

People who talk this way, might not be aware that
modern image backups can be mounted like disk drives,
allowing both browsing and random access for
copying out files when needed.

Well, *this* person "who talks this way" is well aware that Macrium
Reflect (Free) can mount images like disk drives and has *said* so - in
*this* thread - giving an example of file-in-image verification!

An image backup is every bit as good as "folder copying".

But I ain't "folder copying", am I!? I'm making file-level backup (*in
addition to* image backup).

[...]

Char Jackson wrote:
On 2 Oct 2018 19:26:13 GMT, Frank Slootweg
wrote:
[...]
I just tell (configure) my backup software what folders/files (not) to
backup and how many incrementals I want for each full backup (currently
4) and how many sets of full+incrementals (currently 11) I want to keep.
That's all.

So my backup software gives me at dated/timed list of at most 44
full/incremental backups. That these backups *contain* hundred of
thousands of files, doesn't mean *I* have to keep track of them, that's
my backup software's job.

[...]

So you're not doing file-by-file copying like I assume John is doing,
but you're using incrementals which make me nervous in another way. I
don't like the chain aspect of incrementals and would prefer
differentials myself. When it comes down to it, though, I find that I
just do a full partition backup (image) on an irregular basis.

Of course to each its own. That said, yes - of course :-) - my backup
software - Cobian Backup - can do differentials as well and - as
mentioned before - I make image backup *and* file-level backup.

AFAIC, for this part EOD.

Paul wrote:
Paul wrote:

And fresh off the lab table, as I'm typing this,
I tried to do a "Properties" on a folder tree
with 100,000,000 files (a thousand files per folder),
and Windows 10 *crashed* again after counting only
~8 million files.

This is Windows 7 doing Properties on the folder
tree and managing to maintain its dignity while doing it.

https://i.postimg.cc/HWwGLK3J/Win7_s...s_on_FAT32.gif

Paul

This is the same test case, with the files taking one
(16K) cluster for each file. First I create the folder
tree and put zero-sized files in it (so the directories
don't get fragmented), then fill the files with content
using "open in append mode" on a second pass.

https://i.postimg.cc/ncy3MGRr/2_TB_FAT32.gif

The runtime to do that is about 7 hours or so.
To do that on a real hard drive would take... quite a while.

Paul

In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

What's your method of monitoring for bit rot and repairing it if/when
you find it?

synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only, and Synology
(and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud of their NAS products.
Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it should come
populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO. Instead, it's empty.

My single-bay Synology DS115J was EUR 89, some USD100. Not really
something to rob a bank for.

Oops! As nospam mentioned the low-end boxes such as my DS115J don't
support btrfs. Cheapest one with btrfs support is the dual-bay DS118 at
about USD200.

dual-bay would be a ds218 (thus the 2 as the first digit).

full list of btrfs support:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowl.../General/Which
_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_Btrfs_file_system

nospam wrote:
In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:

What's your method of monitoring for bit rot and repairing it if/when
you find it?

synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only, and Synology
(and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud of their NAS products.
Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it should come
populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO. Instead, it's empty.

My single-bay Synology DS115J was EUR 89, some USD100. Not really
something to rob a bank for.

Oops! As nospam mentioned the low-end boxes such as my DS115J don't
support btrfs. Cheapest one with btrfs support is the dual-bay DS118 at
about USD200.

dual-bay would be a ds218 (thus the 2 as the first digit).

full list of btrfs support:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowl.../General/Which
_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_Btrfs_file_system

Thanks. Duh! PEBKBAC. If I fsck things up, I make a royal job of it,
don't I!? I looked up the right model (DS218) on the Synology site, but
apparently looked at a DS118 when looking up the price in a local
webshop.

So make that about USD300 for a DS218.

In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:


synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only, and Synology
(and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud of their NAS products.
Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it should come
populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO. Instead, it's empty.

My single-bay Synology DS115J was EUR 89, some USD100. Not really
something to rob a bank for.

Oops! As nospam mentioned the low-end boxes such as my DS115J don't
support btrfs. Cheapest one with btrfs support is the dual-bay DS118 at
about USD200.

dual-bay would be a ds218 (thus the 2 as the first digit).

full list of btrfs support:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowl.../General/Which
_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_Btrfs_file_system

Thanks. Duh! PEBKBAC. If I fsck things up, I make a royal job of it,
don't I!?

yep, and you did it again

I looked up the right model (DS218) on the Synology site, but
apparently looked at a DS118 when looking up the price in a local
webshop.

So make that about USD300 for a DS218.

almost. a ds218+ is about $300. a ds218 is about $50 less:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077PJX8TH
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075N1BYWX

the 218+ has an intel processor (versus realtek on 218) and supports
virtual machine guests and docker. it also has an esata expansion port,
the port on the front is usb3 and its memory can be increased to 6gb.

both support btrfs, but the additional features are well worth $50 more.

John,

I've got a bit of a problem. A few of them actually:

I cannot seem to find Macrium reflect free choices of version. The only
free (home) version I could find/download is 7.

Installing went well, but it shows gibberish for the OSes partition label.
Not really happy with it.

Trying to create rescue media aborts because "the mount path does not
support reparse points". Which I think is rather normal for FAT32 (I'm
testing on a spare machine) ...

Request: Do you maybe still have a link to v5 ? I would like to see if it
works better.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

nospam wrote:
In article , Frank Slootweg
wrote:


synology nas with btrfs.

btrfs looks interesting, but it appears to be Linux only,
and Synology (and QNAP as well) appear to be extremely proud
of their NAS products.
Over $900 for an 8-bay Synology unit? For that price, it
should come populated with reasonably sized drives, IMHO.
Instead, it's empty.

My single-bay Synology DS115J was EUR 89, some USD100. Not really
something to rob a bank for.

Oops! As nospam mentioned the low-end boxes such as my DS115J don't
support btrfs. Cheapest one with btrfs support is the dual-bay DS118 at
about USD200.

dual-bay would be a ds218 (thus the 2 as the first digit).

full list of btrfs support:
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowl.../General/Which
_Synology_NAS_models_support_the_Btrfs_file_system

Thanks. Duh! PEBKBAC. If I fsck things up, I make a royal job of it,
don't I!?

yep, and you did it again

I looked up the right model (DS218) on the Synology site, but
apparently looked at a DS118 when looking up the price in a local
webshop.

So make that about USD300 for a DS218.

almost. a ds218+ is about $300. a ds218 is about $50 less:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077PJX8TH
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075N1BYWX

Yeah, I took the local Dutch prices in Euros and guestimated them to
USD. It's actually even worse than I guestimated, EUR 278.90 is USD
322.52.

Of course the USD prices in the US will be lower, often by a lot. It's
not unusual for - for example iPhone - prices to be 10-15% more
expensive in Euros than the US prices in dollars, i.e. an actual price
difference of some 25-30%. For the Synology DS218, the difference is
indeed 29%! Sigh! :-(

the 218+ has an intel processor (versus realtek on 218) and supports
virtual machine guests and docker. it also has an esata expansion port,
the port on the front is usb3 and its memory can be increased to 6gb.

both support btrfs, but the additional features are well worth $50 more.

R.Wieser wrote:
John,

I've got a bit of a problem. A few of them actually:

I cannot seem to find Macrium reflect free choices of version. The only
free (home) version I could find/download is 7.

Installing went well, but it shows gibberish for the OSes partition label.
Not really happy with it.

Trying to create rescue media aborts because "the mount path does not
support reparse points". Which I think is rather normal for FAT32 (I'm
testing on a spare machine) ...

Request: Do you maybe still have a link to v5 ? I would like to see if it
works better.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser

You would want version 6. It's a reasonable version.

Someone tossed out a breadcrumb for the previous version.
Test and see if it still works.

http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v6/ReflectDLv6.exe === stub installer

gives downloader 6.0.553.0, select a 32 bit or 64 bit version,
plus WinPE5 or WinPE10 to make emergency boot CDs.

v6.3.1849_reflect_setup_free_x86.exe 44,303,520 bytes

v6.3.1849_reflect_setup_free_x64.exe 46,645,904 bytes

Example of release note. The link for this probably
shows up a few weeks after the above.

http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v...ls6.3.1852.htm

The updater will update you to the end of the 6 stream anyway,
if you want it.

*******

The "reparse point" could be coming out of the WinPE10 kit.
Try WinPE5 instead maybe. The WinPE10 kit could even have
"versions" and be based on one of five or six versions
of Windows 10 WinPE. If Microsoft bumps that, who knows
what will break.

I've used the product on a FAT32 system, but I don't
do regression testing or anything. There will always
be new surprises. Software matures until it becomes
over-ripe and falls over under its own weight.

Paul

Paul,

You would want version 6. It's a reasonable version.

I'm not sure anymore who suggested I should download (and try) all three (5,
6 & 7) of them. Didn't think I would go about it in reverse order. :-)

Someone tossed out a breadcrumb for the previous version. Test and see if
it still works.

I just downloaded the stub installer. A good start.

The "reparse point" could be coming out of the WinPE10 kit. Try WinPE5
instead maybe.

IIRC I got only a single choice, the version you mentioned.

Though I'm a bit surprised that the Rescue Media creator did offer-to-select
a WinPE version which doesn't support the already found filesystem.

Software matures until it becomesover-ripe and falls over under its own
weight.

The term I've heard being used for that is "feature creep". But yes, it
often goes that way. Understandable, but always a bummer when you see it
happen.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser