Dave: Thanks for pointing out the -H flag to preserve the hard links. That seems like a Very Good Idea. I've been backed up many systems with the method described and have yet to run into issues with hard links.
Your other options and cautions are not appropriate in the context I put forth: "Boot to sda3, be root and and make a shadow of everything from sda1 to sda3, maybe with..." Note that I am not advocating doing a full backup of a live system here. Your concerns would be valid if the hypothetical system were booted to its normal root partition, sda1. Your mention of mount -o bind / /mnt/root causes me to suspect that you are confusing filesystem snapshots with the unrelated "rsync with snapshots" method described at http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ Again, thanks for pointing out the -H option to rsync. George -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
