First packaging steps for some (for me at least) usefull stuff.

Partition Image is a Linux utility which saves partitions in the
ext2fs, reiserfs, hpfs, jpf, xfs, fat16, and fat32 formats an image
file. Only used blocks are copied to save the space and to increase the
speed. The image file can be compressed, in gzip, or bzip2 formats, and
can be splitted into small files to be copied on floppies (1,44 MB,
ZIP, ...) or CDRs.

Partition Image will only copy data from the used portions of the
partition. For speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the
image file. This is unlike the 'dd' command, which also copies empty
blocks.

Then, the partition can be restored if there is a problem on the
partition (file system error,virus, error in data, ...), from the image
file. It can also be used to install many identical PCs with the same
hardware. You just have to install an only PC, and you can copy the
linux partitions to all others.

Be careful, this is an alpha version. Then, there can be bugs, and
changes in the data format between differents versions. Don't backup
important data with it, and use the same version to save and to restore
the same image file. Please, report all bugs to the author.

See /usr/share/doc/packages/partimage/html for help.

Authors:
--------
Francois Dupoux
Franck Ladurelle