Unstructured braindump
If CIFS does not follow symlinks correctly:
echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled
Backup:
dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip -c | split -b 2000m - /mnt/backup/backup.img.gz.
Restore:
cat /mnt/backup/backup.img.gz.* | gzip -dc | dd bs=1M of=/dev/sda