On 07/25/2010 03:26 PM, Ross Walker wrote: > > Better then dd over ssh, Well, no... If you're trying to do an *image*, you'll find that cpio can't write an image out to a block device. It's fairly easy to make dd as bandwidth efficient as clonezilla. 1: Clear all of the unused blocks on the local filesystem which you want to image: # dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/zero # rm /mnt/zero 2: Copy your filesystem to a file: # umount /mnt # dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/var/tmp/fs.img 3: Compress your filesystem image: # bzip2 /var/tmp/fs.img 4: Copy the image to the remote system: # ssh root at remote 'bzip2 -dc | dd of=/dev/sda1' < /var/tmp/fs.img.bz2 Can't get much better than that for low-volume copies. If you need to repeat the process on a lot of machines, clonezilla gives you some nice options. If you're copying files instead of images, cpio might be useful.