[Cialug] Best imaging software

[kristau]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 5:25 PM, LancePickett00
<lancepickett00 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I need to save a partition (like Ghost)  Win XP,Vista & possibly
> linux-ubuntu, on dual-boot systems.  What are some of your preferences for
> booting from a CD and dumping/restoring on an FTP server?  Any other ideas?
> How about copying said image to a CD  or DVD to carry as an emergency
> restore?

I have used a combination of gparted and dd in the past with a lot of
success.  You can find both of these utilities on most live distros,
but I specifically used System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org)
for my systems.  The following is a high-level overview of the
process:

Image creation:
1) Boot system to be imaged to the live CD.
2) Run gparted and resize the partitions to be imaged to about 1GB
larger than their "used" space.
3) Use dd to capture images of each partition.  Most efficiently this
is accomplished with an external USB/Firewire hard drive.
    * You can pipe the output of dd through gzip or bzip2 to compress
the images further.
    * You can pipe the output of dd through netcat to "ship" the image
across a network connection (unencrypted).
    * You can pipe the output of dd through gnupg to encrypt the image
(-c option is good or symmetric cipher).
    * You can combine the above methods for additional functionality.
4) After the images are taken, you can use gparted to grow the
shrunken partitions again, if needed.

Image restoration:
1) Boot to the live CD.
2) Use gparted to create/re-create/edit the partition table.  Create
the target partitions the same size as the shrunken version you
created above.
3) Restore the image from external media (or over the network with
netcat) in the same manner it was created (i.e. pipe it through gunzip
or gnupg).
4) Use gparted to grow the restored partition.

Note that there are utilities like g4l or partimage that automate a
lot of this for you.  I settled on this method because I was able to
use it across various live CD's (knoppix, SRCD, Ubuntu, etc.).  Most
of the live CD's have dd and gparted, but many do not have g4l or
partimage.

You do have to keep some documentation with the images (shrunken
partition sizes, table layout, etc.), but that can just be put in a
text file.  I especially liked the option to pipe the dd output
through gzip, followed by gnupg, followed by netcat for secure
shipment of images across a network.  You can just dump the
encrypted/compressed file out at the other end, or pipe it through the
same utilities to reverse the encryption and compression, if desired.

Hope that helps!
kristau
-- 
Tired programmer
Coding late into the night
The core dump follows

My GNUPG public key is available at http://www.kristau.net/public_key.asc