making a backup of my linux filesystem with tar and bz2

[Tony Baechler]

Nick Gawronski wrote:
> 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?



Hi,

Try this:

man tar
tar --help

Seriously, that's why we have man pages. Even most rescue CDs include 
them and they generally answer your questions. I'll give you a clue 
though. You want to have it create a file and not write to tape. I know 
of no easy way to generate the archive, split it, copy it, cat it and 
extract unless you have an extra partition somewhere.

Instead, a better option might be mondo. I know nothing about it and 
can't comment on accessibility, but it looks like exactly what you want. 
I intend to look into it later. It's in Debian Etch but I don't know 
about Gentoo or live CDs. There is also a boot disk called mindi but 
again I don't know about accessibility. http://www.mondorescue.org/ If 
you try it, let me know how it works.