RECCD is a toolkit for creating a recovery CD. This is a CD which you insert, boot from and confirm overwrite of your hard disk. After confirmation, a compressed HD image is written from your CD to your hard disk. This destroys all the old content and replaces it with the content during creation time of the image.
RECCD works on block device level, therefore it is independent of operating systems and/or filesystems. The drawback is that it is very slow, although the slowest part is the compression/decompression with bzip2. Replacing bzip2 with gzip results in improved speed at the cost of a larger image. See the documentation for details of the tradeoffs.
With Linux, about 2 GB (or even slightly more) of programs will fit on one CD. Windows doesn't have so many text files, expect about 1.5 GB to fit on one CD. Note that I'm talking about system and application programs, not data. Neither is a recovery CD useful for backup of data, nor do the above figures remain valid with data files (which could already be compressed, e.g. mp3-files).
The system should work even with 30GB hard disks, as long as only about 2 GB are really used and the rest of the sectors are filled with zeros. Since I don't have the equipment to really test this situation, I would be grateful for your experience.
The current stable version is reccd-0.6.0.tar.bz2 (about 444 KB). You either need the bunzip2-utility to unpack the archive, or a current version of GNU tar. In the latter case, you can use a command like
tar -xvIf reccd-0.6.0.tar.bz2to untar the archive.