About diskimage and virtual filesystems

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1

Hello. I’m interested in store several files (about a few GB) in a BFS filesystem, to make use of the extended attributes.

At the same time, I also would like to have an easy way to made a backup of them (preserving the extended atributes). Until now, I use to zip them before copying to an external drive, or upload them to Dropbox.

I noticed the “diskimage” tool, that allow to create a virtual BFS filesystem on a file and mout it as a disk. I found interesting the posibility of use it like a BFS disk inside Haiku, and at the same time, the posibility of backup it under other filesystems preserving their atributes, without the need to create a zip file.

Anyone tried this before? There is some advice about my idea?
Thank you!

2

Totally possible. For example:

  1. Create a 100 MiB image:
    dd if=/dev/zero of=MyImage.img bs=1M count=100

  2. Register the image:
    diskimage register MyImage.img

  3. Open DriveSetup, find the MyImage.img in the list and format as BFS.

Now you can mount MyImage.img via double-click and unmount with Tracker. Or mount from UserBootscript with:

mkdir -p /MyImage
mount /path/to/the/MyImage.img /MyImage
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3

Reminded me on a small tutorial made by rennj and I translated in Dutch here: http://users.skynet.be/Begasus/boot.htm :slight_smile:

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4

I find this feature a very useful one. I have used something similar countless times on macOS, where its Disk Utility app allows easy disk image creation. Maybe one day it gets included in a nice GUI utility.

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5

Thank you to everyone for your answers!

6

http://old.besly.de/menu/search/archiv/cddvd/createbfsimage_terminal_eng.html

An old tutorial, mkbfs are changed to makefs iirc.

You can mount ans iso, bfs with a double click in the file (haiku). But bfs are haiku only, orther systems does not know bfs (Linux driver are available iirc)