During my data rescue attempts, I took a backup of the images via network. Netcat and dd must be combined for this purpose, but it works marvellous.
The following command has to be issued on the machine where the images are stored:
dd if=my_image | nc client 1024
And on the client which stores or writes the image to a disk, you have to call:
nc -l -p 1024 | dd of=my_output
Just a little trick for those moments where it is easier to use the network rather than installing new hard disks...
EDIT: Of couse, the commands have to be executed first on the client, then on the server. I consider my few readers intelligent enough to know this.