You can spend a lot of money on backup software for your servers, but my absolute favorite is "Ghost for you" (g4u), which was written by a German university professor. Please send him a donation if you use this software and like it as much as I do. It is available at g4u
Here is the gist of how it works. He started with NetBSD, which is one of the four main Unix-like BSD operating systems that evolved from the original BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) that was developed at the University of California at Berkeley. (By the way, the Mac OS X is based on the newest of these four, which is called "Darwin.") He pared it down to the bare essentials that include a tiny kernel, a DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol) client (so you can get an IP address) and an FTP (file transfer protocol) client.
When you boot up with his CD or floppy, your machine gets an IP address and a login connection to an FTP server you create. I just used my Mac OS X and enabled the FTP server, and I created a directory called /Users/install/ where I keep all my disk backups.
Among the nice features of g4u is that it works with any operating system, including Mac OS X, Linux, Microsoft Windows and OS/2. . The reason is that it creates a byte by byte FTP copy and then compresses it by a factor of 10. Thus, for example, a 10 GB hard drive will be under one gigabyte. The gzip compression utility is used, so the backup file will have a .gz extension.
g4u provides excellent documentation, so just follow it. I use g4u whenever I build several machines with identical hardware, e.g., the four Dell Laptops that I currently have for sale.
In fact this backup is so good that it evens work with totally different hardware. I took the Dell Laptop backup of Mandrake and put it on a desktop machine with a different network card, sound card, monitor and video card and a bigger hard drive. I then booted up my desktop using the harddrake program to detect my new hardware and configure it. Everthing worked in 5 minutes. The only additonal thing I had to do was make use of the extra 7 gig of space I had on the bigger desktop hard drive. I used the program called diskdrake which was already installed. Be careful when you use this as you could destroy or overwrite a partition. It is best to first have a backup before proceeding. I simply clicked on the empty part of the hard disk and created a Linux native formatted partition with a name of /data for storing documents or what ever else the user wants to copy there.
Wait a minute, I just want to backup a few folders on my Desktop! Ok, no problem. Please see Perl . The first script will do it for you using the tar function.