Backup/Restore to DVD from Knoppix?

[vogelap]

I am seeking a complete system backup/bare metal restore utility that would do the following:

* Bootable LiveCD that boots with a backup/restore tool that can interactively backup the HDs in the machine to DVDs (multiple DVDs if necessary).
* Boot from it's own CD/DVD media (ideally, though not critical)
* Backup to DVD (multiple DVDs if necessary) my Linux (FC5/FC6) server
* It would be awesome if this utility could backup my WinXP machines as well as Linux

Does Knoppix do this? If not, could it? If Knoppix isn't the answer, can anyone recommend a very reliable backup to DVD/bare metal restore solution?

The LiveCD could be ANY OS, if it will do what I seek.

[cbagger01]

You can use KNOPPIX to do this, but you will need to write a script to perform the tasks and you will also need a program called "splitpipe" so that you can send data to multiple DVDs.

You can use the built-in "dd" command to grab raw data from your hard drive, including the partition table and the partitions themselves.

You can then pipe the data through "gzip" in order to compress it down to a smaller size. I recommend gzip compression speed "2". It is a good balance between speed and compression efficiency, but you may need to use speed=1 or even skip the "gzip" part entirely if you get DVD burning buffer underruns due to poor CPU calculation speed.

Then you use "splitpipe" to route the data stream over to multiple DVD-R disks that are burned using the growisofs or similar utility program.

You can get "splitpipe" here:

http://ds9a.nl/splitpipe/

and choose the "Debian" package and use it to install after you boot up the knoppix livecd or livedvd