Disk Cloning et al.

[Valmont]

I need a disk cloning utility or an application that backups a whole partition in one go.
- It should be able to store the image on a hard disk, dvd and cd-rom.
- Prefereable in a compressed format.
- It should offer a tool to restore the original partition image from a bootable cd-rom AND from a partition using a dos console or something similar.

I am willing to pay. What are my options?

[Belisarius]

Use Knoppix to run the dd command. Costs nothing. Seriously, I'm not kidding, it's quite good, I've been using it.

Man page. You can target partitions or disks. I'm willing to bet you can do on-the-fly compression as well, but I haven't actually tried it. Just run gzip or bzip2 and pipe to/from image file.

Barring that, try Ghost. You can do pretty much the same things with dd, but Ghost makes the whole process easier by automating the various processes you'd need to do manually with dd.

[idx]

Dolly?
http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/CoPs/patagonia/dolly.html
http://corvus.kek.jp/~manabe/pcf/dolly/

-r

[Kernel_Killer]

dd and netcat all the way. Cheap and reliable.