Cheat Sheet: Backing Up a Disk Remotely with ssh and dd

Quick and dirty way to remotely backup a disk with ssh and dd

Remote Disk Image Backup

Start up a shell with network access from a emergency boot disk like clonezilla.
Run dd and pipe it to ssh, send it to pv (pipeviewer) for status, optionally compress it, and then output it to a file on the destination server.

You can backup a live system, but be prepared to have to clean things up like filesytems and databases.

dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M | pv | bzip2 | ssh user@backup-server.com "dd of=/export/backups/system.08.01.2014.img.bz2"

Pipeviewer

Pipeviewer is an awesome utility for monitoring the progress of an activity through a pipe
No longer need to kill -SIGUSR1 the dd process number to get a status on what dd is doing

Sending a few SIGUSR1s from another terminal with "kill -SIGUSR <pid>" for the dd command that is running

[root@system ~]# dd if=/dev/xvda bs=1M | gzip | ssh user@backup-server.com "dd of=/export/backups/system.08.01.14.img.gz"
Password for user@backup-server.com:
304+0 records in
303+0 records out
317718528 bytes (318 MB) copied, 61,3709 s, 5,2 MB/s
315+0 records in
314+0 records out
329252864 bytes (329 MB) copied, 65,1725 s, 5,1 MB/s

Using pv instead of a bunch of kills...don't forget to type in your password for the remote server!

[root@system ~]# dd if=/dev/xvda bs=1M | pv | gzip | ssh user@backup-server.com "dd of=/export/backups/system.08.01.14.img.gz"
Password for user@backup-server.com:
 535MiB 0:02:06 [4,12MiB/s] [                       <=>                        ]

Installing Pipeviewer

Unfortunately pipeviewer doesn't come on too many systems by default.

Ubuntu: Available in the repositories: sudo apt-get install pv
FreeBSD: Available in the ports collection: cd /usr/ports/sysutils/pv; make install && make clean
CentOS: Available from RPMforge: yum install pv