I have experience with making bootable images of AIX systems using mksysb and wondered if there was some type of equivalent software for Linux. Or perhaps some of the folks here have alternatives or unique ideas for how they are backing up their Linux systems enabling them to recover them as quickly as possible. I am looking to experiment on what some of the best ways to recover the operating systems and data may be.

What sense is 'system image' meant in? Does AIX bring the system offline and make an image of the entire hard drive, or is it doing something else?

AIX mksysb writes the current kernel and system to tape (may now to cdrom ?), there are several
programms for linux that work the same way. ask google for g4l, ghost4linux etc.

since PC do not support booting from tape you will find no programms but all other types (dvd,cdrom,usb,...)

We've been using Storix for about a year. It was created by the guys who created and refined the mksysb code for IBM.

It has a central server which retrieves the data and creates a boot CD. You go to the fresh machine, boot the CD and it automatically negotiates the connection with the central server and rebuilds the system. We use it to do across the 'net OS level backups and create a duplicate system if necessary (such as when you have four web servers and want to add a fifth configured the same; boot the CD, give it the new info and the server's up). It's pretty sweet and as far as I know, we haven't experienced a problem with it.

Carl