Disks
Partimage
This client/server application allows you to backup partitions over the network. I have used it a few times and consider it a useful tool for bare-metal restores. It won't play nice with LVM though. Doesn't appear to be actively maintained. The partitions need to be unmounted, so you might as well reboot with System Rescue CD and use the partimage client from that.
Also, I have encountered various strange error messages about version mismatches. I was only able to quell them by turning off login and SSL.
g4u
This is cool, based on NetBSD and comes with the Ultimate Boot CD (see below). It uses ftp to transfer an image of your entire hard disk, but will also accomodate individual partitions as opposed to partimage which will do partitions only. Therefore it may be more suitable for LVM or BSD (ufs) filesystems which use slices instead of "true" partitions.
To upload an image of the 1st and second SCSI disks (IDE disks would be wd0 and wd1)
uploaddisk ftpuser@ftpserver image-sd0.gz sd0 uploaddisk ftpuser@ftpserver image-sd1.gz sd1
This is how to download a full-disk image and overlay it onto 1st and 2nd SCSI disks
slurpdisk ftpuser@ftpserver image-sd0.gz sd0 slurpdisk ftpuser@ftpserver image-sd1.gz sd1
System Imager
I haven't used this yet, but it looks interesting.
Hiren's BootCD
another rescue disk with many utilities for repair, recovery etc. More of the DOS/Windows types. Have yet to try.
Related
- Knoppix Live CD contains a plethora of utilities such as dd, e2fsck, resize2fs and more. Highly recommended!
- System Rescue CD contains the partimage client and server among other useful things. Unfortunately it is getting to be outdated, in particular it doesn't have an up-to-date version of e2fsprogs.
- Ultimate Boot CD has lots of diagnostic, recovery and disk wiping tools such as g4u and DBAN.
- g4u Homepage
- Linux P2V
- physical 2 partimage 2 vir - A blog specific to cloning systems using partimage mediation.
- UDPCast uses multicasting