To Create a Whole Backup of a Drive
dd if=/dev/vda | ssh [email protected] 'gzip - > /home/babinlonston/Desktop/backup.gz'
To restore, you have to take the server down and manually image the disk. Perhaps a hard drive swap or something of the sort. copy data over with a filemanager from a live CD.. grsync is an easy GUI for using rsync
To place the image on the [new] drive:
gzip -d < image.gz | dd of=/dev/sda2
well to recover, you cannot just do it "live", ie, while the system is running off of that hard disk. You would need to either to boot from a live medium (cd/etc) and do the disk image there, or perhaps pull out the hard drives and put them in another computer.