Image server across network

[Jeff Boyce]

Greetings -

I have a PE2600 that I am scheduling some maintenance on (e.g., firmware 
updates).  This is my only Linux box in my small office and is used mainly 
as a Samba file server for about 10 Windows clients.  Before I conduct the 
firmware upgrades I plan on making an image of my server so that it can be 
restored easily if anything goes bad during the firmware updates.  I have 
done this in the past by attaching a portable usb hard drive directly to my 
server, boot the server to a live linux CD, and issue a command such as: dd 
if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=8192 conv=noerror,sync.  Where sda is my raid5 
virtual drive and sdb is the usb drive.

The problem is that with my PE2600 the usb device is very slow (usb 1.0), 
and in order to image the entire 140 GB it takes about 36 hours.  I am 
wondering if there is a more efficient way for me to create my server image, 
such as connect the portable usb hard drive to my desktop system (a new 
Optiplex 755 running Vista), which has a faster usb connection, and create 
the image across the network connection.  I use Putty and NX Client from 
NoMachine to connect to the server from my desktop system, although I could 
also boot to a live linux CD at my desktop if necessary.  Is this a feasible 
option for what I am trying to do?  And can anyone give me some pointers on 
how I would go about doing this?  Thanks.

Jeff Boyce
www.meridianenv.com