"Ghosting" is the process of duplicating an entire hard drive or media storage device bit-by-bit.
Ghosting is a great way to duplicate an entire drive, and while Symantec will be happy to sell you their ghosting software, you can always use dd, an open source alternative.
Useful External Resources:
How to ghost a drive using dd on linux
Mac OS X use of dd to recover a hard drive
Example:
dd if=/dev/hda1 bs=1k conv=sync,noerror | gzip -c | ssh -c blowfish user@hostname "dd of=filename.gz bs=1k"
Since I use a mac, I can't find sfdisk. Furthermore, dd and an extended partition table don't seem to get along, so I've been instead using this process to ghost and duplicate disk drives with my correct settings:
backup mbr
backup first and only partition from the drive, to keep it manageable, I limit the install size to 2gb. I can always shuffle around some stuff later.
plug in a new drive
restore the mbr - the kernel should then re-read the new partition table
restore the first and only partition
Hopefully that works!
UPDATE: Rather than mucking around with the mbr and partition table, I'm just dd'ing the disk device from the beginning to a little past the end of the size of my data. If I have three partitions that take up 6GB, I'll dd from 0 to 7GB. So far its worked OK.