making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Nick Stockton]

The USB thumb drive could always be formatted with ext2 or some other 
non-journeling file system.
If You would rather use fat32 though, you can always store the large archive 
in a temporary place and use split to split the file in to how ever many 
chunks you want and copy them to the USB drive.  Then when you want to 
restore the archive you can use cat to concatenate the small chunks back in 
to the big archive.

Nick Stockton
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tony Baechler" <tony at baechler.net>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 8:29 AM
Subject: Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2


> 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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>>
>
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