tar as a file system backup

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2012 at 11:14:06AM -0500, William Muriithi wrote:
> Morning pals
> 
> I am planning to repurpose a server and I am kind of hesitant of
> reformatting it as I am not very certain if I got everything backup.
> 
> How  safe is it to assume this command has compressed and archived
> everything on the old system?
> 
> tar -zcvpf /backup/servername-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`.tar.gz  /
> --exclude=/backup --exclude=proc
> 
> Just may feel a little more confident if I get a second eye saying all
> seem fine as long as tar exit with 0 flag

If you want to be really sure, dump the disk to a file, so you can go
and loopback mount it later if you need anything.

Can't get anymore complete than that.

Besides wouldn't you have to exclude /sys, /dev/pts, and lots of other
virtual filesystems?  /proc isn't the only one.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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