My google-fu must be sucking. i havent been able to find a good solution for the following: numerous Linux server on commodity hardware Trying to do a recovery mirror copy to external harddrives External harddrives are smaller than source harddrives, but larger than data External drives are connected via usb2 (slow) Servers range from 20GB of data to 400GB of data Servers are remote, so hands on access is a pain need to copy boot files. empty external drives currently Basicly, looking for a way to do use a ghosting solution from INSIDE a running linux server to an external harddrive, without booting a cd etc. the rsync/cpio solutions i've looked at dont work great with grub/dev/proc etc. I understand that since the system isnt offline, it wont be a "mirror" image as files change, but thats ok. Are there any free/commercial products that would work?