Automate Linux installation and recovery with SystemImager

Automate Linux installation and recovery with SystemImager
Imaging software, commercial and open source, creates compressed images of a client's hard drive data and stores them on a central server. These images can then be used to restore systems or roll out new ones. One useful open source imaging applications is SystemImager.

As far as the article goes, if implemented properly, this software could be especially useful with something like Gentoo, when an installation can last for hours - not to mention configuring that installation and installing software after that.

Backing up your install locally is as easy as tar'ing your home dir and storing that backup either on an optical disc or on another hard disc partition.

This sounds like a nice alternative though, and can make farm installs easy.
backup: dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=4k | gzip > partition_image.gz
restore: cat partition_image.gz | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/hda1

Of course '/dev/hda1' would be different for most, but you get the idea.

Copy/Pasted from here: http://forum.s-t-d.org/viewtopic.php?pid=10106
1) Mount a samba share
* mkdir /mnt/remote_share
* smbmount //Server/Folder /mnt/remote_share -o workgroup=Your.Domain,username=YourName,password=YourPassword
2) BACKUP with blocks of max 2gb
* dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -c | split -b 2000m - /mnt/remote_share/mypc_sda.img.gz.
3) Restore
* cat /mnt/remote_share/mypc_sda.img.gz.* | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/sda
Not very useful for small incremental backups but great to restore the basis of your server fast.

g4u (Ghost for Unix) has been my favourite for a long time: http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/ . From the article it seems even easier to use than SystemImager. Set up a ftp server and your deployment server is good to go.