Hi,

I have a system with two disks and a 200GB tape drive



65G 5.8G 56G 10% /
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1 99M 74M 21M 79% /boot
/dev/cciss/c0d1p1 135G 63G 66G 49% /var/opt
none 1.5G 0 1.5G 0% /dev/shm
[manuel@sxmail backup]$

Can I do tar -czf /dev/st0 / to get the entire system, or will I need to do it for each disk?

thanks

you may need to add an --exclude option to not get /proc.
tar by default spans filesystems. there is an option --one-file-system for making it not do so.
tar will not pick up boot sectors or a partition table. just files. you can though, make a file of your entire boot partition with dd if=/dev/whatever of=/boot/partition. than backup that file and you can restore it with tar, and write it to the partition with dd, and get a bootable system, as long as the partition is active, and same size and same place, maybe same disk model.
you can also fdisk -l > /partitions.txt perhaps to make catastrophic restorations easier.

thanks, I'll add the --exclude and run it tonight and see what happened in the morning.

manuel

remember p for preserve permissions and --same-owner for restoring.