making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

Nick Gawronski nick at nickgawronski.com
Thu Jan 1 16:52:53 EST 2009


Hi, so what command would I run from the mount point where my USB drive was 
mounted to only backup the local ext3 filesystem using tar so the contents 
of the USB drive would not be included in my backup and when I wanted to 
restore it I would be in the directory where the USB drive was mounted and 
would mount my system on another mount point what would I type to do the 
restoration?
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nick Stockton" <nstockton at gmail.com>
To: "Speakup is a screen review system for Linux." <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Thursday, January 01, 2009 7:48 AM
Subject: Re: making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2


> 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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>>> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
>>> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>>>
>>>
>>
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>
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