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The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/cyr0nk0r on 2024-01-22 21:50:18+00:00.
I'm out of the loop on the current best way to handle this. Back in the day, I'd boot from a USB disk, boot into Ghost, select my USB disk as the destination location, and take a whole disk image of the drive.
I'm looking for something similar, but a little easier to use. I don't want to use PXE since we already have PXE being used for imaging. I'm imagining the following process, and tell me what tool or combination of tools I might need to accomplish.
Step 1) Boot from USB stick. (This is the preferred method for various internal reasons)
Step 2) Select drive that contains the operating system for the computer.
Step 3) Point the destination location to a network share, ideally supporting SMB/CIFS.
To restore, I just flip flop Step 3 and Step 2.
Our goal is to have disk images of industrial control machines in the event of drive failure or any other issues. The images would be stored on a network share. These machines are highly specialized with very specific software that we don't always have the installers to. Restoring via reinstall of OS is not an option in most cases.
I'm fine with something open source as long as it's not super complicated to get going. I'm also fine if the process is through CLI since we won't be taking or restoring images but maybe once per year.