[vox-tech] Utility to image a hard drive

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Thomas Johnston (trjohnston at ucdavis.edu):

> I installed Debian (lenny) on my laptop last week and it is my first
> exposure to Linux.  I was wondering if anyone had a recommendation for
> a utility to "image" my laptop's hard drive to an external drive.

The usual way:

1.  Boot the live CD of your choice.  (I use Sidux.)  
2.  Make target filesystems on the external drive (matching the ones to 
    copy).
3.  Use rsync.

This sticks to standard, simple tools, and is fast and reliable.  Also,
it generalises nicely to copying datasets across networks, too.  (It
won't make the target drive bootable, though.  For that, you'll just do
a standard GRUB install, if you need it.)

See:  "Copying Directory Trees" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Admin/ 

I'm aware that the above answer is not what you're looking for:  You're
looking for a reassuring, dedicated drive-cloning tool.  I see that
other people are giving you some of the usual answers of that sort.
Mine is the Unix-ey sort of answer, which type IMO tends to be more
useful over the long term.