I use wine to run WOW on my Ubuntu Hardy machine.

I would like to back up my WOW installation directory (and if possible the version of wine i am running) and store on a different disk in case i lose my primary drive.

Could someone please explain how to achieve this in the most efficient manner? I would like to be able to untar, under a different kernel and play without any hassle.

My goal is to make recovery very easy in the event of loss of disk, corruption in filesystem etc.

Thanks in advance.

About backing up the version of Wine, I think it's only feasible (will cause less hassle) if you compiled Wine yourself. You can back up the entire Wine setup if you make a backup copy of your ~/.wine directory - it will not just back up folder contents but the simulated Windows Registry settings (which installed programs may use) as well; but of course this assumes the default location of the Wine simulated C:\ drive at ~/.wine/drive_c, and assumes your WoW installation at C:\Program Files\Blizzard Entertainment\World of WarCraft (or something similar, I'm not familiar with WoW).

Hope this helps.

I make "regular" backups of my machines. (Don't we all? )
I have found that it is "best" to backup a disk that is not being used at all.

So I boot from a live CD.
I mount the partitions to be backed up.
I mount the backup device.
I make the backup using rsync (slow the first time [hours], but very fast subsequently [minutes]).

The first time I did this, I removed my HDD, and put in a clean one, and attempted to restore from a supposed catastrophic failure: The result was interesting - it was much more difficult than I had anticipated, but worked in the end, and I learnt a lot.

If you don't test your backup strategy, you do not know if it will work when you really need it. You have been warned. Better an afternoon testing than a lifetime's regret for personal data that is lost forever.