Part image - save a partition

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

Welcome to Partimage homepage

Description: Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a
supported filesystem to an image file. Most Linux and Windows filesystems
are supported. The image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2
programs to save disk space, and they can be splitted into multiple files
to be copied on CDs / DVDs, ... Partitions can also be saved across the
network since version 0.6.0 using the partimage network support, or using
Samba / NFS. If you don't want to install Partimage, you can download and
burn SystemRescueCd. It's a livecd that allows to use Partimage immediately
even if your computer has no operating system installed (useful to restore
an image), and it allows to save an image on a DVD on the fly.

Partimage will only copy data from the used portions of the partition. For
speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the image file. This
is unlike the 'dd' command, which also copies empty blocks. Partimage also
works for large, very full partitions. For example, a full 1 GB partition
can be compressed with gzip down to 400MB.

This is very useful to save partitions to an image in some cases:
First you can restore your linux partition if there is a problem
(virus, file system errors, manipulation error). When you have a
problem, you just have to restore the partition, and after 10
minutes, you have the original partition. You can write the image to
a CD-R if you don't want the image to use hard-disk space.
This utility can be used to install many identical computers. For
example, if you buy 50 PCs, with the same hardware, and you want to
install the same linux systems on all 50 PCs, you will save a lot of
time. Indeed, you just have to install on the first PC and create an
image from it. For the 49 others, you can use the image file and
Partition Image's restore function.