I'm thinking about resizing a couple of partitions on my system drive and to do this, I want to backup the system to my backup drive. I also would like to just do a simple backup using a script. I've only used tar in the simplest of ways so I would like to check it's usage before I trash things.

I "think" that I want:

tar -cfz /backup/backup(todays_date).tar.gz --exclude=/dev --exclude=/proc --exclude=/tmp --exclude/home/* /

I "think" again, that both /dev and /proc are "virtual" things that will be recreated when I boot into the new system??? (Can someone shed light on this???)

I "think" too that the /tmp folder will be created upon boot also (or do I want --exclude=/tmp/* to save the mount point)????

I have to exclude the files and folders "under" /home (but not the mount point) because my /home is on it's own drive.

Then once I've repartitioned my disk,created file systems and mounted everything (using a recovery cd):

tar -xvvzf /backup/backup(todays_date).tar.gz /(mount_point_of_root)

Will this work or do I need to change some things?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

wouldn't it be easier to use partition magic

robbow52, i'm not sure what kinda backup you're trying to achieve... if what you're looking-for is a quick way to restore your whole drive (a bare-metal restore) it's better to use something like mondo rescue:

http://www.mondorescue.org/

I have been using Ghost as a "quick" recovery method for my installation. It will not allow me to resize my partitions exactly the way I want, however, so I am just looking for a quick method of "copying" my file system to my backup drive.

I will look into Mondo and see what it's about.

Thanks!

boot a live linux cd... mount the source partition you want to backup and the empty destination partition... then just copy the contents of one into the other...

for example:

mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda1 /mnt/hd

mount -t reiserfs /dev/hda6 /mnt/hd_backup

cp -vR /mnt/hd/* /mnt/hd_backup


then to restore just do the opposite:

cp -vR /mnt/hd_backup/* /mnt/hd

Thanks! I've got some ideas now to try.