The issue here is having to have the space to write the image to and having the disk mount rw to do it... (though neither of those is a major problem)

I also think I would prefer a backup and restore program to be separate from Frank's display server...

My current thoughts are an ftp server which can serve the images of /dev/hda2, /dev/hda3, /dev/hda5, /dev/hda6 and serve the files that live in /drive0 and /drive1

on the desktop side we put the partition images downloaded from the ftp server into an upgrade file (using Smu's UpgradeBuilder) and we save the files from /drive0 and /drive1 to whereever the user wants to put them...

To restore it is a matter of applying the upgrade file using emplode (or building upgclient into the restore program) and doing a put to /drive0 and /drive1 of the contents of the local directories...

It would be nice to be able to read the kernel image off the empeg too... as this would then give us a COMPLETE backup... (is there anything else?)

Extra features would be to be able to flag whether you care about backing up /dev/hda2, /dev/hda5, or /dev/hda6 (or the kernel image if we work out how to read it) as you may not have modified them... which would change what is included in the upgrade file that gets built...

What this requires is a reasonably feature rich ftpd on the empeg (I am thinking of wu-ftpd at the moment as it has SITE EXEC which might be useful and security isn't a major issue and it can gzip etc on the fly) and the ability to serve drive images as files (which I have some ideas about)...

I'll see how I go... but I would love input...

Cheers

Kim