Copy hard disk or partition image to another system using a network and netcat (nc)

netcat utility (nc command) considered as TCP/IP swiss army knife. It reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP protocol. It is designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.

I also install the netcat package for administering a network and you’d like to use its debugging and network exploration capabilities.

One my favorite usage is to migrating data between two server hard drives using netcat over a network. It is very easy to copy complete drive image from one server to another.

You can also use ssh for the same purpose, but encryption adds its own overheads.

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