newbie question here - I am renting a remote machine with redhat 9 installed, and successfully hosting several sites on it using the pre-installed plesk software.

I am (carefully) working my way around the system using shell access, configuring areas that I can't in plesk (advanced MySQL etc).

I would like to completely back the server up to my local machine (windows), and use this backup to restore to another local machine so that I can test settings on a dummy server rather than the live one.

What are the best and easiest ways of doing this?

Without buying expensive software and hardware, like Veritas (Netbackup) or the like, probably just a script that tar's up the data you want and rsync's it across the network to your own machine, etc. Perhaps write a script that does incremental type backups according to file dates, etc, and then do a weekly full backup/rsync, etc.

how does tar handle open files?

to do the restore, do I install a minimal system then just restore all of the files from the backup over the top of the new system?