suggestion for disastery recovery (was Re: more on hardware clock)

[Adam Myrow]

For those situations where you've installed something that messed your
whole system up, or if you scramble your partition table and have to start
over, I have a little utility to suggest.  http://dump.sourceforge.net
contains Ext2 dump and restore.  This is a simple backup utility based on
the dump and restore that first appeared in BSD and later got renamed to
ufsdump and ufsrestore in Solaris.  Basically, it makes backup and
restoration fairly simple.  It was originally designed for tapes, but can
write to files just as easily.  It's a bit tricky to install, because it
wants to set the owner of the man pages to "man" which seldom exists.
Look at the configure options carefully.  What I did is to build the
package in a statically linked form.  Then, I put a copy of this
statically linked restore on a floppy.  That way, I could get to it from a
rescue disk and it would work no matter what libraries are on the rescue
disk.  It lets you do a full restore or an interactive restore where you
can type "ls" and "cd" just like in the shell to navigate the backup and
select files.  One word of warning, it is slow about restoring single
files from the middle of a backup since it's designed for tapes, but there
are options to help with this.  However, a full or incremental backup and
restore are very quick.  It can take a 2GB partition and can back it up in
about 10 minutes uncompressed on my system.  It takes just under 2 hours
with compression, but it packs that 2GB into about 790MB with the highest
compression enabled.  Give it a look.  I wish Slackware included it by
default, but it doesn't.