[plug] Open source drive copy for multiple OSes

[Gavin Chester]

On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 20:04 +0800, sothisistheinternet wrote:
> Hi again all,
> 
> In our slow crawl towards open source at work, we're starting to look
> at alternatives to basic programs before we take the plunge with
> desktops or servers. Right now I'd like to find a drive imaging
> program that will permit me to make a drive copy (preferably
> compressed) to an external drive or DVD burner of our servers' OS
> drives. We haven't moved to a linux server yet (but we now have space
> for an attempt at this), so the drive image would be of a Windows 2003
> SBS system. We need to be able to keep the image and restore to new
> hard drives in the event of a serious hardware failure.
> 
> I was thinking of using a basic linux boot disc and learning more
> about the dd program. Would this do the trick, or should I be looking
> down another path?

For backup with/without compression try "rdiff-backup" - it also offers
the benefit of maximum speed by using rsync under the hood once you've
done the initial backup.

For cloning a complete os for deployment across many cloned machines,
with no file or link exclusions, try "clonezilla".

Can't offer you urls atm, nor do I know whether you'll get clones of
your windows servers from a separate linux box, but worth knowing about
those two as far, far better than dd.

HTH. Gavin.