Quote:
Originally Posted by repilo
The image I created from my original µSD is 32 GB in size, which is reduced to 2 GB zip compressed.
The image that DNSB kindly sent me is only 900 MB (400 MB compressed).
|
After mounting the µSD card on my computer and before creating the image, I copy all the files from the FAT32 partition to my computer, do a full format on the FAT32 partition and then copy the saved files back. The freshly formatted space compressed extremely well so the images became a lot smaller. This does add some time to the required time but the smaller size and cleaner image, it's worthwhile to me.
I started this procedure after one person who had received an image from me wrote a thank you for their Kobo working again. They also mentioned since they were taking a computer forensics course, they tried some of the course tools on the image I sent. They was quite surprised to find that the FAT32 partition had quite a few files that were recoverable—they were able to recover ~2GB worth of ebooks and personal information from the image. I then checked using an undelete utility and, yes, there was a lot of recoverable data which the full format removes.
For an image for your personal use, this procedure is not necessary but for an image that may be distributed, it's definitely a good idea.