mondo

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Mondo is pretty heavy duty backup utility. You can save to a multitude of media, anywhere from network servers to a local hard drive to bootable cd/dvd disks. You can also choose to restore individual partitions, files, directories, or do bare metal imaging from the bootable disks.

If you have multiple machines with the same hardware configuration you can image them all from the same disks. Say you have a half-dozen identical workstations to install Linux on. You just install the OS on one, run mondo on it, burn the .iso images it creates, and then just use those .iso images to image all the rest of the machines.

I did a bootable backup of my main workstation with mondo and created bootable disks for it. The system disk has 20 gigs of files on it. Mondo backed that up on 3 dvd disks with the third disk only having approximately 3 gigs of data on it. So, it does a good job of compressing data, and only took approximately an hour and half to accomplish, which includes burning the disks. It's mainly hands-off though. You tell it what you want it to do, go away and let it do its thing, then come back to burn the disks and you're done. It will do a restore from bare metal in a matter of minutes.

To do that you tell mondo when you've booted into the disk to "nuke" the hard drives and it partitons and formats them to the previous file system type and restores all files.

I guess you could call it an open source Ghost.