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1) dd mbr + data on disk

2) sfdisk partition data, then use xfsdump/xfsrestore to recreate the partition data on disk

Both of those have the advantage of being easily scriptable, and a disadvantage of being fairly dificult to deal with variable disk sizes without doing quite a bit more work.

You could also look at partimage which may be more what you had in mind - http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

partimage

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

I haven't used it since probably 2005 or so, but it used to work quite well over the network.

So the answer everybody is over looking is don't buy it if it doesn't come with an install CD. ...
Seriously if you shop for the cheapest you will get the cheapest. The companies really are giving you what you want and are willing to pay for.
Think of it this way. The average person when looking for a PC if they see two identical machines but one is $10 then the other because it includes a recovery CD will buy the $10 cheaper machine.
I am adding $10 because it takes time to burn, test, pack, and replace bad CDs under warranty so you need to charge more then $1 or so that a black CD will cost.
frankly if you buy a machine and it lets you burn a recovery CD that should be the first thing you do.
Other options for the slashdot crowd are.
http://www.clonezilla.org/
and
http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page
Hey make your own back ups folks and you will not have this problem.

cause it's so hard to do that

While partimage is excellent software for cloning/backing partitions at a high level, it does have its drawbacks. Specifically, it can't restore to a larger partition directly - you'd first have to restore to the same size partition and resize it (while not a big problem, it is still a hindrance for me at least). This makes it a little tricky for when your old disk fails and you want to upgrade capacity when you restore.

Take a look at DAR for your purposes.

I've used FOG before, a few months ago, in fact. It just isn't production ready yet. IIRC, you had to install a service on the windows box, etc. The web interface was somewhat counterintuitive and left a bit to be desired. It also had a few rather annoying bugs. This may have changed since the last time I used it. I'd say that as it was a few months ago, you'll be pulling you hair out since it works just enough to let you see what it's capable of, and then falls through on delivery of said capability. Give it another few months if it isn't there yet, it will be great once it gets to RC maturity.

I always fall back to using the PartImage live CD, or a live CD that uses partimage, and then booting a VM with the parted daemon to accept the incoming system image. It will GZip the image on the fly, then you can just split(1) and burn to DVD (dual layer burners are cheap now, but use archival grade media or DVD-RAM for long term storage... you'll thank yourself for spending the few extra bucks/pounds down the road.).

Many live CDs have PartImage now, Trinity Rescue Kit, Ghost 4 Linux, Knoppix, System RescueCD (just had another release lately), and the rest of the usual suspects, as well as many forensics live CDs.

FWIW, I have used partimage to mirror a Windows install on to another drive, and then back to the original again, and since you get a gzipped img file, you can use it with KVM, Xen, VMware (after conversion to vmdk or ovf). Check out Convirt for provisioning systems from a gzipped img file. It's also not production ready, but very cool nonetheless.

I was looking into taking a snapshot of a fresh+patched windows install because I was tired of reformatting and then spending hours reinstalling+patching.

I checked out http://www.partimage.org/ which seems to be the tool targeting what you're trying to do.

For me, it didn't work out because the only apparent way to burn an image to disc is to have DVD+RW media and I didn't have the patience to wait until I could get to the store to buy the rewritables.

Unfortunately, partimage support for NTFS is still 'experimental', although that's not as bad as it sounds. See http://www.partimage.org/Supported-Filesystems

Partimage. Haven't used it before but it seems pretty popular, and seems to be what you're looking for.

Maybe 6 hours for Windows and maybe a little longer for Ubuntu.

Once that's done I make an image of my harddrives in case something goes wrong. For Linux I use partimage, and for Windows I use ntfsclone - never had any problems.

I then periodically update the images when I install and configure major software. Making an image takes about half an hour for Linux and 10 minute to reimage the drive, and for Windows it takes about an hour to image the drive and about 30 minutes to reimage the drive.

I love Ghost too... it's a lifesaver. However it can get expensive if you need many copies. You should also consider using the (obviously free) linux partimage which can do the same things. In fact, it can make images of a greater variety of filesystem types (at least compared to the last version of Ghost I used). Even if you're running Windows boxes, you can still boot off of a Linux LiveCD, and use partimage to backup/restore partitions (in fact, there is a Linux LiveCD specifically optimized for rescuing your PC: System Rescue CD, which includes partimage).

You should be using file system aware backup software.

I use partimage off a CD for Windows or Linux partitions.

Zeroing or randomizing unused drive space is for privacy only.

You could find some techniques to install a Linux system automatically on a lot of computers at http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/kickstart.html

Copy'n'paste:

Kickstart is a Red Hat package that deploys Red Hat to multiple
installation targets with minimal customisation. SystemImager is a
third-party tool that does a better job. http://systemimager.org/

fai (fully automated install) is a Debian-based tool to do likewise.
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/ Like System Imager, it's
suitable for building clusters.

Replicator is similar. http://replicator.sourceforge.net/ It tries to
do some customisation for differences in hard disk sizes, video cards,
etc.

Partition Image is a semi-automated tool for replicating a Linux
partition to multiple targets. http://www.partimage.org/

(Of course, you can also use an LNX-BBC maintenance disk and "dd"
or dump/restore images. Pick your poison.)

But if you're using any Windows systems with NTFS, you should know that NTFS support for partimage is still in the experimental stage. This is according to the Partimage website. To quote them:

The NTFS (Windows NT File System) is currently not fully supported: this means you will be able to save an NTFS partition if system files are not very fragmented, and if system files are not compressed. In this case, you will be able to save the partition into an image file, and you will be able to restore it after. If there is a problem when saving, an error message will be shown and you won't be able to continue. If you have successfully saved an NTFS NTFS partition, you shouldn't have problems as you restore it (except in the case of bugs). Then the best way is to try to save a partition to know if it is possible. If not, try to defragment it with diskeeper or another tool, and try to saving the partition again.

Personally, I can't wait until NTFS support becomes stable.

A better idea would be to use partimage. It doesn't image bytes that are unused, or not used by files, so your images are much smaller. Using dd, a 40GB disk would result in a 40GB image. Using partimage, it works out to about a 4 gig image. It's very effective, and it's bootable on a cdrom.

Try partimage (http://www.partimage.org/ . It doesn't have all the management tools like remote imaging, certificate security, etc, but I routinely use partimage from a Knoppix CD to clone Windows machines. Once cloned you can change the sid using newsid.exe from Sysinternals (http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/parti mage.html).

If you want to get really creative, maybe you could put a small linux partition on the systems that you can boot to for this purpose. Or maybe you could make a bootable system restore CD. Here is a faq to get started: http://www.digitalissues.co.uk/html/os/misc/partim age.html.

Many of you already know this, but one of the great things about linux LiveCDs is the ability to work on an otherwise screwed-up computer, and salvage it (or the data on it, etc.). A LiveCD is absolutely great for fixing a Windows or linux PC that has gotten messed up. For instance, you can create backup images of disks using partimage and restore them with a LiveCD (in particular, the SystemRescueDisk is good for that).

A Knoppix LiveDVD is more geared towards booting a PC and being productive (with OpenOffice, Blender 3D, etc.)... however it's a great thing to have lying around because you can diagnose and repair a system, do a full virus scan (as pointed out in TFA), while having internet access, being able to open relevant wordprocessor documents, etc. etc. A LiveDVD like this could also help in extracting files from a corrupt filesystem (you can open and work with the files immediately, if that becomes necessary).

To anyone in the /. crowd that has not played with LiveCDs yet (or linux at all) you should seriously consider burning a copy and seeing what all the fuss is about.

At my site there are Windows servers but there are also Novell, Linux and SunOS. Is there a solution for those too?

Yep. It's called Partimage.

Ghost is OK, but partimage (http://www.partimage.org/) has more or less the same features, and it is Free Software.

Supports most filesystems: ext2fs/ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, HPFS, UFS, HFS, FAT16/32, and NTFS. Don't be afraid of the "experimental" support for NTFS, it works great if you follow the advice: defragment the filesystem first (I also disable the swap file and hibernation, to get rid of those not-movable and unnecessary files); then try to make the image, and if it suceeds, you're OK.

I've been using it for over a year, mostly for NTFS (who needs ghosting with Debian anyway?), and so far it has worked as a charm.

You better use partimage. It leaves unused blocks out. And it comes with knoppix. NTFS support is "experimental", but i never had problems with it. And for everything else, it is stable.

A lot of my family members and friends use Microsoft Windows and over the years I must have spent months fixing their systems myself or telling them on the phone what to do. I am tired as hell of playing the pro bono Microsoft support tech and I no longer offer any kind of support for anything Microsoft related to anyone. Period. My immediate family members now all have a dual boot system with their favorite version of Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD 4 with the following free software:

• KDE
• OpenOffice
• Sylpheed-Claws
• Opera
• FireFox

Keep in mind that all of the software above also has versions that run on Windows, so there is no need to use one application under Windows and another under FreeBSD. Great integration, no confusion, easier transition.

The raw Windows partition is backed up in an image file created with dd, so if there's any Windows related trouble they can't fix on their own they just boot the special FreeBSD floppy which employs a simple shell script (using dialog) to let them backup or restore the primary partition image. If you need something more complex like Norton Ghost then I suggest you use the absolutely free and cool replacement called PartImage.

If they have any trouble while using FreeBSD they just click a special icon named "Call for help" which starts a shell script that sends a number of specially crafted packets to my computer's static IP, where such packets are logged in a special file which I see on my desktop (tail -f), so if I'm available I can log into their system via ssh within minutes of any sign of trouble and they do not even have to bother to email me, let alone use the phone to call me. It works like a charm.

I feel sorry for the people who buy Microsoft Windows and then call me to help them out when things go wrong, but I just can't afford to waste my life fixing what should not have been broken in the first place. Enough is enough.

http://www.partimage.org

It'll backup across a network or to pretty much whatever you want. Also you can make a boot disk and use it to back up a non-Linux OS.

In addition to that I would recomment to have a look at PartImage, it basically does a similar job to 'dd', but it is 'filesystem-aware', thus it is able to save only the used blocks of the disk and not forced to everything. Especially with todays 120gb drives the saving can be quite huge.

I think you're looking for partimage.

I also save the MBR and the output of fdisk -l seperately.

Beware that support for NTFS is still experimental.

You can get a lot of the way with dd/bzip2/ssh
However if you want bells and whistles like
progress bars etc, then have a look at partimage.
BTW, I asked question 3.1 in the FAQ.

partimage works pretty well for that and costs nothing. It's not GUI though and would be scary for novices to use especially since you have to understand how Linux numbers drive letters and mount the partition you're backing up to. If you have 256 MB RAM (or a burner on a separate drive than the CD you boot partimage from), I believe you can backup a partition directly to CD-RW or DVD+/-R.

I've become so fed up with the traditional "windows rot" that I decided that only my own, full-disk-image savepoints will do.

These days hard-disks are cheap. Set up a Linux server with partimage and a large disk, boot the windows workstations with SystemRescueCD, and make your "savepoints" at those times you install drivers, etc. Make sure you partition the disk into "system" and "user data". Partimage works great even on NTFS if you're careful to defrag first.

As a professional, I can't imagine supporting anyone without a copy of SystemRescueCd on hand for just these kinds of problems. A single linux bootable CD image with GNU software such as GNUParted, QTParted, and Partimage, all of which are excellent and FREE replacements for PQMagic or Ghost.

FWIW, I had pretty good luck with partimage. The NTFS support worked fine for me back in 2001, which was about when I used partimage last... Don't know whether it has improved since.

Ghost does several other things, and is a bit more space-efficient. Ghost parses filesystem structures and can restore to drives of different sizes.
That said, there does exist a good free ghost-like tool or two for linux, which actually parse common linux filesystems:partimage even has experimental NTFS support!

Microsoft's patching system makes it a snap to update your computer. Under Linux I have to groan over long and cryptic commands like "apt-get dist-upgrade" and lumber off to get a snack while my system is automatically updated. With Windows Update and a CD writer you can get a clean, protected computer with just a few easy steps. Allow me to elaborate.

I run a Windows 2000/Redhat 9 system. I got sick of reinstalling the OS and every single driver, recustomizing, etc, everytime Windows started acting up. So I came up with a solution. I downloaded Service Pack 4. Then I ran Windows Update until it had installed all the patches. I went into the "Add-Remove" programs listing and wrote down the numbers of all the patches I had installed, then went to Microsoft.com and downloaded the standalone installers. I burned them all to CD along with my backups and installers for all the programs I use (OpenOffice, etc) unplugged the network interface, and reinstalled Windows. Apply SP4, all patches, reboot, shut down. Then I booted into Linux and used PartImage (which has decent but experimental NTFS support) to take a snapshot of the installation (size ~600M with compression), reboot, install all applications, customize, reboot, shutdown, boot into Linux, take _another_ snapshot of the partition with all the programs installed (size ~3G). Then I booted into Windows, plugged in the interface, downloaded the things I had forgotten, and had a working system. Now when I need to reinstall I just download the new patches and programs, burn them, unplug, re-image, patch and install, reboot, image, and reboot. If I need to go back to the pristine image (like if one of the patches has an "incompatibilty" I don't notice at first before I blow away the old image), I have it on CD.

I was hoping to get a boyfriend this year but I suppose that'll have to wait. For some reason I never seem to have the time...

Over time I've collected a disorganized handfull of links related to free ghost type stuff on my online dumping ground.

Of those, Partimagelooks the most promising to me, though I still haven't had the chance to try it.

• It compresses (gzip or bzip2) the allocated parts of filesystems, and leaves out the unallocated.
• It can work in client server mode over the network.
• It can automatically split files, e.g., on the 2G boundary
• Available on live bootable linux cd:s such as knoppix

Looks good.. The only problem is that their site lists NTFS support as experimental.

I maintain several labs. We currently use Partimage off a gentoo live cd. This works great for windows 2000 machines in our labs. Previously I used ghost with no problems on windows NT, but 2000 might be different. I always used it from a "boot" disk not from a running system.

Andrew

• Partimage
• Udpcast
• G4U
• ...

And with these kinds of application, the OS which it uses is of no concern anyways: these tools usually come with their own bootdisk, and there is absolutely no problem to duplicate a Windows partition using a Unix based tool!

Have you looked at Partition Image? The NTFS support is still 'experimental', but it can load images over a network from a server. I don't know if it can boot them or not, but it's open-source, so I'm sure you can get some kind of help from the developers toward adding that sort of capability yourself. Then, you'd just need to make a set of bootable CDs that run the partimage client and automatically rewrite the hard drive with the correct image. Shoot -- if you put 2GB of RAM in them, would it be possible to go diskless and load everything onto a RAM Drive? That way, the PC rewipes itself every reboot and you might even get a kick in performance if the disk accesses don't clog the memory bus too badly.

Now, this probably doesn't help because you are looking for a Windows setup, but if you needed Linux, what about rolling your own customized version of Knoppix?

IIRC, the latest versions support network booting from hosted images, and several others have taken Knoppix and tweaked it with various different hardware support and software changes (Overclockix, for example, adds stuff like support for NVidia's NForce2 chipset using NVidia's Linux drivers, which Knoppix won't include because of the licensing terms.)

...though, on second thought. I suppose if you were willing to go through all that trouble, you might just be willing to host the /usr tree read-only from your server -- that would do about the same thing.

Here is a free solution: set up an OS partition, a data partition, and a image partition. Use something like PartImage to re-image. When they get spyware, nuke the OS partition.

With a bit of work, you can make it all automatic over the wire, or ship a diskette that will do it. I used to use a slackware boot disk and keep an image server in the office. That way I didn't need a image partition on the desk top. The down side is you have to be very careful to get the correct image for the hardware you wish to reimage.

Norton Ghost is not Free Software. Are there not any OSS alternatives to Ghost??

Well, there is partimage. However, I still find I prefer a tar gz ball. This way different partition sizes don't matter as they do with ghost and partimage. More work on the setup though. BTW, ghost has the same NTFS problems partimage does. Knoppix includes partimage.

If you are going to make your own image, check out partimage, a projcet for doing just that.

The only thing you have to wonder is if you can boot off that DVD at all. Hmmmm, Windows Pain, why bother with it?

Partimage makes an "intelligent" copy of a partition. I.e., it only copies the sectors that actually contain data. This gives a smaller backup than a full copy of the disk.

It can read NTFS partitions, and it can connect to a remote server to store the file.

They even provide bootable disk images, so you can use it without installing Linux on the NT machine.

I've just spent the last 21 months as network person at Moor Park High School in Preston, Lancs. I implemented two Linux servers which did internal www which staff could access parts of via their W:\ drive, mail, proxy (with authentication and ability to block kids by a gui), ability to reclone damaged NT/2000 workstations, quota limits for kids, staff and pupil shared areas (accessible via S:\ and T:\ drives), shell access for kids, remote KDE/GNOME desktops in a window for staff (not that they used them!)...

The whole thing cost them £400 in software. Unfortunately two weeks ago they still insisted on me spending 7 hours a week standing in a library doing duties telling kids to take their coats off... and all for less than six pounds fifty an hour (probably 9-10 USD per hour). They're now looking for three people to replace me. I've now gone self employed and am the cheapest IT person I know even at more than twice the rate they paid me.

The biggest difficulty I found with implementing Linux was getting it to understand our existing username/password database. You have several options, some of them being:

- Make everyone set a new password (bad idea - they'll want to know why)
- Use pwdump.c (available from Samba mirrors) to create an smbpasswd file from your existing NT or 2000 server.
- Use John the Ripper or L0phtcrack to crack your existing account database. This isn't such a great solution, as some passwords could take weeks to crack, and some passwords will get changed after you cracked them.
- Use Winbind, which is part of the Samba suite which will talk to your existing NT/2000 setup and make those user accounts appear as ordinary users. This is an absolutely great solution once it works; you can give them access to any service you want (it works through PAM, so it's as good as having them all in /etc/passwd in many ways) - such as ftp, ssh, local or XDMCP access, you can chown and chmod files and directories to them, and it just works. It can be, however, an absolute nightmare to set up, and so I've written a document on the subject and how to get past a number of random error messages here.
- Read the comments in smb.conf

Management are always a problem, and it's the usual scenario: if it's Free, it has to be crap. If this is a problem, then instead of telling them how good it is, just show them. It's not difficult to find a spare unused machine in a school, or to boot Knoppix onto something, and you only need something with 16 or 32MB to install Debian or an old version of RH onto it and make it a useful server - machines of that calibre of write offs in UK schools right now with all the money the UK government are pumping into them. (This quarter alone, we had £27,000 to spend on IT - something like $40,000.)

Set something up, and implement a feature that your network lacks - quotas, web, email, cloning (use Partition Image - a much nicer replacement to Norton Ghost), proxy server (use Squid and Webmin so that your boss can easily add users to a list of banned people). Consider writing a cronjob to automatically copy everyone's home directory once a day, and then suddenly you'll be able to restore someones work from backup from any particular day or week (depending on how much hard disk space you have - a couple of cheap maxtor 80GB disks or something similar will do the job) in the space of ninety seconds *every time*. No more messing with backup tapes. (But still do tape backups, because you don't know when a lightning strike/minor earth tremor is going to destroy every hard disk...)

Write a manual. "This is how our Linux boxes were set up. The IP is this, here are the open ports, these packages were compiled from sourc

If you're interested in backing up Reiser partitions, check out PartImage. It does a fair few different file systems, and is GPL.

If the target is 1 sector less, you aren't going to be able to use this tool.

I still think tar and netpipes is the only way.

There are other good ghost utilities out there that boot from a cdrom(BART perhaps isn't bad), but I still need my own custom solution

I suggest you have a look at partimage.org, it understands about filesystems (UFS, HFS, HPFS, XFS, JFS, NTFS, FAT, ext2, Reiser) and is therefoe better for resizing and efficient dumping of filesystems.

We've been using it to clone our NT based workstations at work for some time now and it kicks ass! It copes quite happily with NTFS(!), FAT16/32, Ext2/3, ReiserFS etc etc...

It's a client/server program and they provide a bootable ISO image on their site (saves you having to create one if you're lazy like me) ;). You can also compress the image taken using either gzip or bzip compression.

There is also partition image which is more advanced imo.

Try Partion Image

A nice bootable CD with Partition Image included is Timo's Rescue CD

You can use partimage instead. It supports most filesystems on linux and saves a raw partition without saving empty blocks.