system backup

[Jason Shein]

Noah John Gellner wrote:

>I will soon be sending my Dell laptop in for service and figure that I
>should send it in with WinXP only installed for the sake of my warranty.
>My machine is currently a full linux box. Is backing it up as simple as
>tar cf dell.tar /*?
>
>and reinstalling simple as fdisking, reinstalling grub, and then
>untaring?
>
>If not, what should I do? And if so, how can I create my tar file on a
>remote drive since I dont have enough space on the local drive to allow
>a complete copy?
>
>Noah
>  
>
Use mondo rescue
http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/about/about.html

1 - Use it to make a bootable recovery disk(s)
2 - test the disk(s)
3 - install xp
4 - get laptop back, boot from cd, select the "nuke" option
5 - all partitions, data, are restored to the backed up state.
6 - you also may selectivly restore partitions and individual files if 
ever need be

this is one of my  backup scripts, it will drop the .iso files in the 
/backups directory, and exclude the /backups directory from being backed 
up :

uncomment the mount & unmonut commands and configure for your system if 
your /backups directory is on a removable drive.

backuplocal.sh

#!/bin/sh
# mount the /backups directory
# mount /dev/hdb1 /backups

#copy old backups to alternate names
mv /backups/1.iso /backups/1.iso.old
mv /backups/2.iso /backups/2.iso/old

# Start mondoarchive
mondoarchive -Oi -d /backups -E /backups -F

#unmount the /backups directory
#umount /dev/hdb1



hope this helps

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