making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Tony Baechler]

Keep in mind that most USB drives are formatted as FAT32.  That means 
that you can't have archives over 2 GB in size.  Unless you have a means 
of splitting and recombining files like an extra partition or your 
filesystem will never grow above 2 GB, tar and bz2 probably won't work 
with USB.  You could try backing up to a network drive with Samba or 
similar.  I'm fairly sure that grml has smbclient and support for 
mounting smb shares but I don't know about Gentoo.

Nick Gawronski wrote:
> Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so 
> I can keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of 
> software I want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with 
> out reinstalling everything.  I want to make a backup of just one 
> partition as I have linux on one partition and will be saving the 
> backup to an USB flash drive that will be mounted as well.  What I 
> don't want to happen is for the tar program to also backup all mount 
> points and their contents but I do want it to backup the directories 
> on my ext3 filesystem and the directories for the mount points so when 
> I restore the backup there will be empty directories for my USB flash 
> drives and not directories with all of the contents from the drive 
> when the backup was made.  What would be the best command to do this 
> and use bzip2 with the minus 9 compression option and preserve 
> permitions and directory structure?
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