cpio? afio? tar? These are archiving programs, and work at the filesystem level (meaning they're not *quite* like Ghost, but they're still excellent for backing up data.)

If you want to make an "image backup" then you use dd. dd works at the raw device level, making a sector-by-sector copy of a disk. You can make an exact copy of a hard disk by doing: dd if=/dev/hda of=somewhere bs=8192 which copies *everything* on the hard disk at /dev/hda to "somewhere". "somewhere" can be on a remote server, naturally. You should bzip2 it once it's there, to reduce time taken by the next step.

You can re-create the original image on /dev/hda by booting from a Linux floppy that has enough smarts to mount the remote server via NFS or Samba and also has bunzip2 and dd. This Linux boot floppy would do something very similar to: mount -t smb //remoteserver/images /mnt dd if=/mnt/linuxhdaimage.bz2 | bunzip2 -dc | dd of=/dev/hda

There's *got* to be a better way to do that, though. "rsync" would not chew up nearly so much network bandwidth, but it might have problems with things that require absolute positioning on disk like the MBR, the kernel image, and the loading map. I suppose you could combine the approaches, using dd to recover the MBR and /boot, then using rsync to fix everything else. This would require a separate /boot partition, naturally, but most people have that.

Please note that I have never tried the more complex versions of this. I did use dd and a bootdisk to back up and restore my entire laptop once, but that was it. Take with several grains of salt….

Matt G