FATDUMP

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
EXIT CODES
EXAMPLES
KNOWN ISSUES
AUTHORS
AVAILABILITY
SEE ALSO

NAME

fatdump − Efficiently dump the contents of a FAT volume.

SYNOPSIS

fatdump [options] device|image

DESCRIPTION

fatdump will efficiently extract all relevant metadata and (optionally) data from an FAT volume and dump it to standard output. It works at disk sector level and copies only the used data. Unused disk space becomes zero.

fatdump can be useful to make backups, an exact snapshot of a FAT filesystem to restore later on, or for developers to troubleshoot/investigate users’ issues using the clone without the risk of destroying the original filesystem.

OPTIONS

Below is a summary of all the options that fatdump accepts. Nearly all options have two equivalent names. The short name is preceded by and the long name is preceded by −− .
−m
, −−metadata

Clone ONLY METADATA (for FAT experts). A metadata dump contains all of the FAT volume structures but none of the user data, i.e. all file content will be omitted but the directory structure will be preserved. The output from this command will be relatively small if compressed.

−n, −−ntfsclone-image

Emit an ntfsclone packed image (special image format) as output. This saves space since all the non-allocated regions (and in the case of ’−m’ /’−−metadata’ all the non-metadata regions) will not be written out explicitly, but instead marked as a ’hole’ in the image.

−q, −−quiet

Suppress non-error output on stderr.

−f, −−force

Force a clone, ignoring errors from cluster accounting.

EXIT CODES

The exit code is 0 on success, non−zero otherwise.

EXAMPLES

Dump FAT file system on /dev/sda1 to a compressed metadata image:

fatdump /dev/sda1 | bzip2 > sda1.img.bz2

Dump FAT file system metadata on /dev/sda1 to a compressed metadata image:

fatdump −m /dev/sda1 | bzip2 > sda1.img.bz2

Dump a FAT volume to a remote host, using ssh. Please note that ssh may ask for a password!

fatdump /dev/sda1 | bzip2 | ssh host ’cat > sda1.img.bzip2’

KNOWN ISSUES

There are no known problems with fatdump. If you think you have found a problem then please send an email describing it to fat-support@tuxera.com.

AUTHORS

fatdump was written by Sougata Santra, Tuxera Inc.

AVAILABILITY

fatdump is part of the Tuxera FAT package.

SEE ALSO

fatdebug(8)