I think I know what the deal is! The first time I did this I did it with fsarchiver and  I comp[ressed it with lzma which while compressing better (and taking longer to do) the decompression is faster. To use lzma the command would be:<br>

<br>     tar jcf - /dev/sda1 | ssh <a href="mailto:fatherewithforeignbabies.us@fatherswithforeignbabies.us" target="_blank">fatherewithforeignbabies.us@fatherswithforeignbabies.us</a> &#39;tar xjf -&#39; | lzma  -z -&lt;compressionlevel&gt;  -<br>

          &lt;filename&gt;<br><br>Which would wrap sda1into a compressed tar ball and send the output to the server where the tar ball would be extracted<br>and the following output would be compressed with lzma. Do I got that right?<br>
<br>I just found out I can&#39;t use the server for storage. So I suppose now the command would be:<br><br>      tar cf - /dev/sda1 | tar xf - | lzma  -z -&lt;compressionlevel&gt; -  /dev/sda2/&lt;filename&gt;<br><br>Which would wrap sda1 into a tar ball and feed the output into lzma and save the results to the second hard drive.<br>
Well, if I&#39;m going to do it that way couldn&#39;t I just drop the tar sections? The result being:<br><br>     lzma -z -&lt;compression level&gt; /dev/sda2&lt;filename&gt;<br><br>One final advantage with fsarchiver is that it only compresses and decompresses data. Empty space is ignored. As such the file can be decompressed onto a partition of differing size than that it was compressed from. Looking at the manpage fo lzma it doesn&#39;t seem to be able to do that. Does anyone know the resource that might have been used to accomplish this?<br>