[Cialug] Best imaging software

[Dave Crouse]

Here are a couple links... never used clonezilla myself.

http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://fbim.fh-regensburg.de/%7Efeyrer/g4u/


On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 11:21 PM, dave <dchampion at visionary.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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