I always make a monthly image of all XP machines on the company LAN in case anything goes wrong. I usually do this with Ghost from a Symantec server and now have almost all Debian / Ubuntu work stations and would like to know how I can take a image of the OS and back it up to a server? I tried using G4L which seems to use "DD" and kinda of takes for ever since it takes a bit for bit image of your drive. Is there no utility that will allow me to make a compressed or even un-compressed image of my EXT3 partition?

Thanks for any help!

I use good old fashioned dump. Even on the multi terabyte filesystems at work it performs relatively well. You can back up to disk or a local or remote tape drive. Read the man page though as the options can be a bit confusing.

Mondo Rescue / Archive has 4 levels of compression--none being one of them. It supports tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware Raid.

I too used ghost alot in win, mondo is a quick learn to set up. I make it put out 4200MB images to burn to dvd--it makes ISO files and the ISO limit is 4200+ a few. I set image file size at 4300MB. It still takes a couple hours using Mondo Archive compared to the 20 min. with ghost though. It will back up your whole machine, so make sure to tell it to aviod the paths to windows drives if you don't want it to do those--it asks what and what not to back up in a consol gui. You can check it out here:
http://www.mondorescue.org/