Hello,

Here is my current hard drive setup:
140 GB NTFS with Windows XP installed
4 GB (its full) Fat32 with HP Recovery Software
20 GB reseirfs Slackware -current installed

I would like to backup my entire slackware install, so I could try out a couple other distros and then if I don't like them restore my slackware install. I'm looking for an app that can backup my 20 GB install into a gzipped file or image file on my linux partition that I can then just burn to cds or dvds. Does anyone know of a free app that would do this?

I don't want to resize my windows partition because I don't have it all backed up and have some valuable data on it.

Thanks,
Garibaldi

tar

So how would I do that, just create a new targz file in a directory and then add the root directory to it? What about restoring, how would I restore an install from such a backup?

Make tarballs consisting of everything under / .
When installing Slackware again, after the install, get your cd's/dvd's and untar everything in the appropriate places.

I've never tried this myself, but I see no reason why this would fail?

So could I just make a targz file for every directory in the root folder? I think this would work, but I wonder if there are any apps that might do this (like even a live-cd)?

take a live cd mount your slack partition cd to the / of your slack partition

tar cjvpf /xxx/slackbackup.tar.bz2

xxx is where you want the bz2 file to go

you could do from within slack but you'd have to exclude /proc /mnt and /sys directory's

Why would I have to exclude the /proc /mnt and /sys directories?

/proc /sys are virtual file systems. tar would descend into any mounted file systems is why we exclude /mnt

I tried bz2zipping all the folders other than those 3 but it ran out of hard drive space, even though my drive was less than half full!!

you dont have another partition with enough space to save the file to.

The only other partition I have is an NTFS partition, and linux CANNOT write to NTFS (as you're probably already aware). This is my predicament. What I can try to do is clean up my home dir to make it so the files are less than 4.3 GB, and then just burn the normal unzipped folders onto a dvd.

sure you could do this with tar - but based on your goal, it may just be easier to throw any valuable stuff into /home and burn that, or just burn media files, etc., then just do a full reinstall later. assuming you don't have a huge quantity of additional apps, the time difference probably wouldn't be much either way, but Patrick's already done all the work to assemble the packages

Ok, I'll give that a try. Thanks a lot!