On fedora 12 - 1 drive - 2 partitions: a small partition to boot, a big one for all other things - sda1 and sda2.
I would like to use tar to copy them to a different drive. That way I not only back them up but also reorganize them.
(1) approach 1 - 2 drive approach
On second drive (sdb) created 2 partitions with fdisk, used mkfs to put file systems into them.
Easy to do sdb1. I created a directory /target and mounted sdb1 there. Then used tar pipe tar to copy /boot to /target. Appears to be ok.
Not so obvious how to do sdb2. I can mount it at target but
(1) if I copy / to /target there is recursion?? I tried --exclude=/boot --exclude=/target but it went ahead and copied /target.
Also there are a number of things mounted onto / - see output of mount below
Code:
/dev/mapper/vg_knox-lv_root on / type ext4 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/sdb1 on /boot type ext4 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type ext4 (rw)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/knox/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=knox)
puzzled - is there an easy way out??
(2) approach 2 - 3 drive approach
Looks like an easy way out is to boot sda from a backup and then tar from sdb to sdc. But this requres that I install 3 disks.
Is there an alternative?