Some time ago i managed to clone the drive of my server over ssh. Although transmission was compressed with bzip2 it took awful long and i didn’t have a clue how long i would finally take.
Today i stumpled upon this post. The author uses a tool called pv: pv – monitor the progress of data through a pipe.
To clone a disk into a file over ssh:
dd if=/dev/hda bs=16065b | pv | gzip -c | ssh user@host "cat > clone.gz"
To restore the clone:
ssh user@host "gzip -d -c clone.gz" | pv | dd of=/dev/hda bs=16065b
Nevertheless, i mostly use
ssh foo@bar "dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2" > clone.bzip2
so i need not have my ssh private key laying around some server.