How to backup the entire filesystem?

tehdarkknight

I have a hard drive going bad. I need to know how to tarball everything to keep everything intact...

Here's what I have:

1. Mount all my drives from a live CD.
2. tar -cspf archive.tar /*

Will that second line be enough to keep permissions?

Help please, I don't want to go through another install, and have to rebuild my website...
_________________
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: People who understand binary and those that don't.
Feel free to IM me to discuss anything as opposed to posting.

shrimp123 · Apprentice Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 199 Location: Here!

if the hd is bad/going-bad, here is my suggestion

1. dd the entire disk onto another disk of same(or large disk). this way, even if u messup on the tar, u r in shape
2. use the tar u suggested

whenever i change disks, i do this kind of double backup. (call me pessimistic, but, it gives me some peace of mind)

S

Twist · Guru Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 414 Location: San Diego

Why tar if you want to create a working new drive from the current?

-Get a new drive, hook it up as primary, existing drive as secondary
-boot liveCD, partition new drive to look like your old drive
-mount old drive (now secondary) as read only, new drive as read write
-"cp -aR <src> <dest>" for each interesting data partition (this works fine for your root)
-chroot to new drive, run grub/lilo/your bootloader of choice to create the boot block
-remove old secondary drive as a safety backup, boot new drive

-Twist

tehdarkknight · Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2006 8:11 pm Post subject:

I have 2x 250 GB's and an 80GB, configged this way:

First 250, first partition: /boot
First 250, second partition: /
(The first 250 is going bad)

Second 250, first partition: swap
Second 250, second partition: /home

80 GB, only partition: /var

As far as I can see, tar is my only option, and these are the only hd's I have.
Suggestions for tar?

*edit* How to I copy and retain permissions?
_________________
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: People who understand binary and those that don't.
Feel free to IM me to discuss anything as opposed to posting.

nixnut · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 5:35 pm Post subject:

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Other Things Gentoo.
Not about getting gentoo installed.
_________________
Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

talk is cheap. supply exceeds demand

hulmeman · Posted: Tue Nov 07, 2006 6:46 pm Post subject:

Assuming you,ve got the space: