looking for windows (w2k) backup solution

[Brian Henning]

Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> It seems to be a dd type backup.

It is.  With the added convenience of piping right through gzip on the 
way and being able to save to a local drive or an FTP server.

> since I'm already running dd and have successfully saved and restored, I 
> think the easiest thing would be to nullfile my windows partition first, 
> boot into linux, dd the windows partition to my linux backup disk, and 
> then gz the resulting dd file.

The downside to that simply is you have to have the extra staging area 
to image the entire disk plus the gzipped version.  Pipe the dd through 
gzip to save the overhead:

dd if=/dev/hdwhatever | gzip -9 | dd of=/path/to/storage/area

in reverse:

dd if=/path/to/storage/area | gunzip | dd of=/dev/hdwhatever

(probably stuff you already knew..  there for the benefit of our viewers 
at home)

It's left as an exercise for the reader to find out if block size on the 
reader dd makes any difference in the performance of the gzipping.

Cheers,
~Brian