At work, we tend to use the same base image for multiple installations.
I would often copy a whole-disk image of a system as a matter of
convenience, because that way I only need to dd to the target, without
any additional steps. The problem with this approach is that it is
slower than taking a tarball of the files (from the source) and
extracting them onto the target. That's because it works with a lot
more data than it needs. For example, say you have a 4GB disk which is
only filled with 1GB data. The first method would mean that processing a
useless 3GB of one and zeroes, but my main concern is that the
whole-disk doesn't compress well. So here's what I tried after
creating a tarball:
- Simple file removal and extraction
(
cd /target && rm -r * && tar xf ~/rootfs.tar) didn't work - Re-formatting the drive (
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblkp1) and then extraction didn't work either
The issue is that with the 2 steps above, there still remains much data
on the partition from previous use. That is, file removal and creating a
filesystem doesn't remove the actual data, but rather just makes the
data inaccessible by conventional means. To the data compressor (xz in
this case), that is all valid data. What needs to happen is for the data
that is not allocated to be over-written with zeroes... enter
zerofree which does just that. After it was done, my compressed image
shrunk from ~400MB to ~80MB. The original was about 2GB.