[ltp] Recovery experience (was: Re: Captive Linux GPL NTFS Driver)

[Szakacsits Szabolcs]

On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Tod Harter wrote:

[ ... comments on Linux NTFS support ... ]
> I suppose the other answer is that the ONLY time these days you need this kind 
> of tool is stand-alone dual-boot workstations like laptops. 

And data recovery, accessing external storage devices (NTFS usage is
growing sharply), imaging, etc. For example below is my experience.

My disk physically died (IC25N040 in a T40) after a loud click and never
spun up again. IBM delivered a new, empty disk the next day. But XP
recovery took 2 months, I don't detail why, only the last 1.5 hour.

The 4 recovery CD's are apparently an IBM branded Disk Image from
PowerQuest (now Symantec). It uses Windows 98. The whole recovery process
took 1.5 hour attended. I had to sit next to the computer, replacing CD's,
hitting keys, reconfiguring BIOS, etc. During the 2 months I had to do
this several times and the end result was always a crashing XP during
boot.

I tried the same with Linux open source tools from ntfsprogs by running
off a DVD (basically ntfsclone the minimal image then ntfsresize to adjust
to the underlaying partition size). The recovery took 23 minutes
unattended. Just put the DVD in then start the recovery process and do
whatever you want until it's ready.

I guess the open source way could be still improved if the image is
compressed. I'm able to compress the XP image to about 50% so since the
bottleneck of the recovery process is the bandwidth of the DVD device thus
the recovery time could be reduced maybe to 12-15 minutes.

Proprietary recovery:  1.5 hour attended
Open Source recovery:  15 minutes unattended

IMHO there is a slight difference between speed, price and convenience ;)

> If I need data in NT thats on Linux I just share it on my LAN, so I
> suspect demand for this kind of tool is fading...

Here are some numbers and a graph how wrong you are ;)

    http://sf.net/project/stats/index.php?report=months&group_id=13956

XP takes away 1-2% market share from Win9x every month. NT (NT/W2K/XP/etc)
based OS'es now have over 60% altogether (see e.g. google's zeitgeist) and
most use NTFS. So this grows just like Linux adaption. Consequently a
growing number of people want to access to their data on NTFS from Linux.

	Szaka