hi, i've decided to shrink my win2k(fat32) partition to add to my / and /home partitions, i am thinking that using the tar utility would be my best bet for backing up my system, i would tar my / /home and /boot directories and place them on my windows drive, shrink my windows down to size, then re-do my linux partitions with partition magic, so heres what i'm wondering

when tar'ing up does it skip the directories with a "." in front of them, issuing the command tar cvzf <filename.tar.gz>

once i've backed up, in what kind of steps do i take after resizing the partitions?

any tips and trick are appreciated, thanks!


tjay

Is it really safe to use your fat32 partition as a "backup" device then to shrink it?

How many hard drives?

AK

Yeah, that doesn't sound like a very good backup strategy to me. The whole point of making backups is to get them out of the main storage device, so that if anything happens you will have a safe copy elsewhere.

Saving backups on your primary HDD, and then resizing the partition that the backup is on is just a very, very bad idea.

I would suggest using a second HDD at the very least (though I don't usually approve of HDDs as backup devices, since after all, if HDDs didn't fail, you wouldn't need backups in the first place), or better yet put the backups on a CD or copy them over the network to a different machine.

i was planning on setting them on a cd as well, but as it turns out, i just said f*ck it if i loose everything i don't care, and resized just my / partition, booted to linux and everythings fine

i got lucky.....i wouldnt recommend it to anybody else

tjay