I have used systemrescuecd for a while. They have directions on making your usb stick bootable. (which I did)
I have been doing network backups for our servers.
Here are the steps:
net-setup eth0 (go thru the prompts and select dhcp)
/etc/init.d/nfsmount start
mkdir /mnt/backup
mount :/ /mnt/backup
partimage
I will have to start using the sfdisk. Maybe I will start making a script to automount everything and do a full system backup without any intervention. »