I love socat one-liners. Here's a quick one that I've been using to image new machines (data volumes only; I prefer puppet/chef/ansible for installing my OS and

I love socat one-liners. Here's a quick one that I've been using to image new machines (data volumes only; I prefer puppet/chef/ansible for installing my OS and configuring programs): On the receiver, let's listen on an SSL socket and output the stream of data we receive to dd for writing to a partition: socat openssl-listen:9999 | dd of=/dev/sdc1 Now on the sender, all we have to do is dd if=/dev/sdb1 | socat - openssl:receivinghost:9999 And bam, /dev/sdb1 on the sender is imaged to /dev/sdc1 on the receiving host. Note that dd only knows to read what socat feeds it, so make sure nothing else is connecting to that socket or you'll get a weird image that fsck probably won't be able to save.