I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop on a headless machine to act as a server and a laptop dual-booting W7 and Ubuntu 10.04. I have a network setup so I can vnc, ssh from the laptop to the server.
My question is what is some good software to run on the server that can perform scheduled full backups of clients within the network. It should be close to what windows home server does, which literally makes an image of the entire hard drive so that restoration restores even the OS. It'd also be nice, as with windows home server, to be able to restore by booting to a CD with software on it to connect to the server and initiate the restore.
Do you want to backup windows or linux clients?
It's tricky to do a full disk image 'pull' of a windows client entirtely from the Linux server without anything on the windows box. The easiest way is to run something like drivesnapshot.de periodically on windows saving to the remote server's drive networked with samba.
It's much less common to do full image backups of Linux clients, it's generally enough to backup your /home tree and a list of installed packages - then simply reinstall a fresh machine from the net.