[Cialug] Best imaging software

[dave]

kristau wrote:
> 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
>   
G4L has a bootable CD image.

I like it because it's really easy to use - you just follow the menus 
and it does all of the dirty work for you.

-dc