Your right, but...

You'll have to install grub into the boot sector of the new box, I usually do this with a command like:

dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 | {netcat}

 Or, you could chroot the the mount point on the new box and run grub-install.

Ability to transfer files between different filesystem types (as well as different disk/partition sizes, depending purely on available space).

There are no guarantees, but I have noticed Linux does a good job of booting on a different machine configurations. What I have seen is that I can usually move a hard drive from one machine to another and Linux boots fine.

With Windows the installation ends up being pretty specific to the machine configuration it is installed on, though I have multiple times done "repair installations" that have allowed me to move a drive to a new PC and keep the old installation (it seems to mostly just update the drivers.)

 So to answer your question, with Linux (Debian) you probably would have good luck with this but I can't say for sure.

Hi,

Should work. I have ghosted to different hardware fine. Only sometimes there might be xorg issues which can be fixed.

Debian has awesome hardware dtection so should be fine:)

 

Cameron

Assuming you have an ssh server running, which is more secure than opening a port to anyone:

If the target machine or network is the limiting factor:

dd if=/sourcepath/sourcefilename | gzip | ssh user@desthost "dd of=/targetpath/backup.img.gz"

If the source machine is the limiting factor:

dd if=/sourcepath/sourcefilename | ssh user@desthost "gzip > /targetpath/backup.img.gz"

If you are wanting to use netcat, just break up the commands above and use the netcat commands from the original post.

eg

dd if=/sourcepath/sourcefilename | gzip | nc 192.168.0.20 30 if the target or network are the limiting factors

or

nc -l -p 30 | gzip | dd of=mybackup.img.gz

only compress it at one end as compressing something twice is generally little gain over compressing once.

Hi,

Yes the target is booted from CD. Unless you just want the image file then no CD required of course. The target just needs nc which comes with most distros.

Cameron

What does the | pv | stand for? Thanks

pv is a program that graphically displays the progress/status of data going through a pipe. install it and try "pv cat /dev/random > /dev/null"

Even better - thanks;)

I prefer Clonezilla for server/desktop backups. It can backup to usb drive, ssh server, nfs server or local disk. One of the best features is it can restore an image to a different size hardrive, bigger or smaller as long as the data fits. It also only copies "used space" whereas the dd command will copy the entire drive including empty space. Clonezilla is very easy to use, similar to the windoze Ghost program but open source and free :) To learn more checkout http://clonezilla.org cheers -m