I am looking to do a very simple full backup of my Debian box to DVD, to be able to restore if/when I screw something up. I am planning a full backup performed in separate volumes by top level directory (/home, /usr, /var, etc.). Not just /home and /etc because reinstalling and reconfiguring is a major pain.

Is there a well crafted 'tar' command with options that will do the following things?:

1. retain long names and directory structure/relationship,
2. retain the file permissions/ownerships and dates
3. backup the symlinks
4. limit each output file size to reasonable size (via spanning) (1 GB each, or a max. of 4GB on a DVD)

I know not to try to backup: swap, /proc and /mnt directories, but What about /dev? - How do I backup/restore my list of devices?
What about /tmp? - Do I need any data in there for the next boot after a restore?

Thanks,

Bryan

You can re-create the devices so you don't need to backup /dev and neither /tmp as it only contains some temporary files and there usually is a cron job deleting that folder each day or week.

I would check 'man tar' to begin with but I do believe you need the atleast the '-p' option to retain permissions, I don't remember rest of tar's options.

Thanks,

So, how do I correctly "remake" the long list of devices in /dev on my box without re-installing or doing it by hand, if they aren't backed up? I wanted to be able to be able to do a complete restore from DVD media by using 'tar', and use some drive utilities for handling boot sector backup and partitioning if those get corrupted.

Will 'tar' even backup the name/links of devices or will it recurse into the "devices" and try to back them up ? -- /dev/zero and /dev/urandom could take a while

Thanks,

Bryan

You can create the devices with MAKEDEV script in /dev.

Can't say much about the tarring the devices as I haven't used tar that much.