Netcat: Remote Partition Backup

Remote Backups

For a simple but efficient way to perform remote backups, you can use the dd and netcat commands.

Netcat is available in two flavors ;-):

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emerge gnu-netcat

or

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emerge netcat

To create an image of your entire hda1 partition, start netcat in passive (listening) mode on the remote machine:

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netcat -l -p 10000 > image.gz

On your machine, run dd to read the partition, gzip to compress it, and netcat to transfer the image to the other machine:

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dd if=/dev/hda1 | gzip | netcat -w 5 remote_ip 10000

Refer to How to clone a Linux box using netcat for more information.

Resources

• Netcat: Creating a Listening Port
• Netcat: File Transfer
• Netcat Documentation