Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hi,
>    Can anyone here think of a way to back up remote partitions before
> installing Gentoo? Is there some way to run a command like dd but pipe
> the output it back to my local machine? What other info might I need
> to restore the remote machine later? I figure I'll save the partition
> information from fdisk. Anything else?
> 
> Thanks much,
> Mark

when we did some backups of partitions from one computer to another (and
then clone the partition to few other computers), we did it rougly in
this way:

first make the free space easily compressible, for example  zero-ing it
( dd if=/dev/zero of=some_file_on_the_partition
till it stops on 'disk full', then rm some_file_..., but there may be
better ways)

then on the second computer (were we wanted the backup):
nc -l -p 7777  -q 0 | gunzip | pv >backupfile

and on the first computer
cat /dev/hda1 | pv | gzip | nc othermachine 7777

we were backuping the / partition, so we either booted from a cd,
or just remounted / readonly

pv is a small utility like cat, but prints nice statistics to stderr
(speed,...)


restoring would mean just doing it the other way around

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