system backup

[Peter L. Peres]

On Mon, 16 Aug 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 07:49:30AM -0400, 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?
>
> You should tell tar NOT to decend other mounted filesystems (like /proc
> for example) to avoid a mess.  You should tell it to exclude itself,
> unless you are already putting the tar file on a different filesystem.
>
> You can pipe tar over ssh to a file elsewhere.  ie:
>
> tar -czlf - /* | ssh user at otherhost 'cat > /path/dell.tgz'

Normally you want to do something like that using cpio, and not tar. You 
can prepare a filelist using find / -prune /dev -a etc etc to remove 
unpalatable things from the archive.

Peter
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