Secure data, images, and more with qt4-fsarchiver

Data Recovery

To recover a backup, you can click in the Actions menu on the recover partition entry. The program will show the same dialog used for creating a backup except that irrelevant fields have been grayed out. Additionally, the restore partition with fsarchiver option is automatically activated.

If you have encrypted the backup, you will need to enter the encryption key into the Decrypt backup. Key: field. Then, you will need to again define the number of processor cores that qt4-fsarchiver should use for decryption.

The final step is to enter the destination partition and the name for the desired backup in the Name of back up file: field. The target partition will need to be dismounted during recovery. Otherwise, the software will be unable to restore the data.

Overall, qt4-fsarchiver is very flexible. For example, it is possible for the filesystem of the destination partition to be formatted differently from the source filesystem.

The program deposits the data in the new partition and also restores the original formatting. Likewise, the recovery of data onto a partition smaller than the original device will work fine.

Here, the consideration is whether the uncompressed data fits into a smaller destination partition. Therefore, it is a good idea to save statistical information via a text file that accompanies each backup. This information can then be used to determine the original storage space required by the data in uncompressed form.

Restoring individual directories or backups from remote computers is done in an analogous fashion. The dialogs are the same as those used for performing a backup. The corresponding routines start via either Actions | restore partition via network or Actions | restore directory . You will see a rolling display of the recovered files in a list window.

When Qt4 is unable to restore one or more files, it will ignore these and continue with the recovery of the next file.

Conclusion

Qt4-fsarchiver is a very useful tool when it comes to uncomplicated backups and recovery of files and partitions. However, a learning curve is involved for getting started and for using proprietary transmission protocols or operating systems to perform backups on a remote computer.

Still, on a standalone Linux system, the tool is highly flexible and can replace numerous programs that only back up portions of a system. During testing, qt4-fsarchiver was extremely stable, absolutely reliable, and very fast.