For a short time I am trying to get some knowledge about RH9.

Because I am intending to do a lot of expirementing, it would be nice to make a full backup of everything I have in case I make a fatal mistake, so I don't have to install and keep what I already have.

What I want is very simpel, I want a full backup from everything I have in my partition, so I can set it back in case....

As I have still a windows partition, I can clone from windows, the entire partition with Partition Magic or with Paragon.

I know it is possible to use tar. I have mounted the Win Partition, so I could transfer everything over there or use a packer. In that case I could get everything back with my rescue disk I supose.....?
Perhaps even make a script.
The only thing I ask myself is, can I make a copy of the working OS and then install it back without troubles. I looked in a lot of books, but I could not find the answer on this problem.

Does anyone have a better (easy) solution. Keep in mind that I am not familiar with all the Linux commands, so think about me as a dummy if you explain something.

Does it make sence to make a clone from the bootsector?

Thank you for your time.

CB

It would be a very bad idea (and also probably impossible) to create a working backup of an ext3 (RedHat's default filesystem) partition in a FAT partition (Windows' filesystem) because FAT does not support file permissions as extensively as any *nix filesystem. This means that all files would be copied with owner=root and chmod 777 (everyone can read, write, and execute). Many files must have certain permissions for security purposes. Also, some utilities may rely on permissions, but I don't know if anything neccecary would have those limitations.

My suggestion is to back up all personal files and any config files that you would change. Then, if (when) your system becomes inoperable or inconvieniently broken, simply reinstall RedHat and restore your configuration files. If you are planning on installing new programs, try to use RPM's as much as possible. Keep a list of the URLs from where you downloaded them, and once you get back up and running, just copy and paste the URL's into wget (command-line downloading program) and install. Or, you could write a simple shell script to install your non-redhat RPM's.

Also useful to have a backup of your home directory, where all your settings are kept (usually under hidden directories, those beginning with a dot)
And backup /etc also.

I'd use 'dump' and 'restore' instead of tar.
They are much easy and powerful.

Thank you all.

As I stated I have paragon drive copy up and working under windows. On my laptop I have 2 partitions one with RH9 and one with WINME. I installed paragon on WINME and burned the image for Linux you can get from them.

Under win I connected a large usb drive. With Paragon I made images from all partitions to this drive. It is an almost automatic process, so I let the laptop do his job.

If I got troubles, I can start up with The crd with linux and paragon. It has a file manager on board, so the only thing I have to do is give it the order to restore the image.

If I have found my way in Linux, I'll find a better way.

Thanks CB

Hi,

This might be a way to backup your whole system:
http://www.linuxaddicted.org/index.p...&pid=20&dbid=1

Good luck!