[NTLUG:Discuss] Norton Ghost equivalent for linux

[Chris Cox]

Thomas Cameron wrote:
> You can use dd for local drives, but they have to be identical.  So put
> your source drive as the slave on the first IDE controller, your target
> drive as the master on the second IDE controller, and do this:
> 
> dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc

Or across the network, boot each box with a recovery cd image
that has network connectivity and some kind of rsh or ssh (more
likely) transport.

On the box being created do:

ssh existing-host "gzip -c </dev/hda" | gzip -d -c >/dev/hda

(you can skip the gzip if you the bandwidth)

ssh existing-host "cat /dev/hda" >/dev/hda

If I'm doing several, I store the image on a storage server
in compressed form:

(on existing-host)
gzip -c </dev/hda | ssh storage-server "cat >/images/mydisk.img"

Then on the boxes being prepped use a recovery CD with
networking:

ssh storage-server "cat /images/mydisk.img" | gzip -d -c >/dev/hda

(if you like the flexibiliy of having uncompressed images
you can do that and skip the gzip compression stuff.. nice
to have if you plan to mount the disk image read only on
the storage-server for instance).