[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Does anyone know of a way to make a backup image of the root drive for recovery > on tape. I don't know if you can use dd to write an image to tape. I'm using tar for backups. At the end of this message is my program for backup to dat. The mybck variable can be set to whatever you want it to be (I use the backup date; 02012000). The "-n" part is just a numbering scheme. It writes the log file to /root as whatever mybck is set to .log. 02012000-1.log You will want to exclude things that are correct for your system (I'm excluding /c and /d since they are win partitions). Any system created directory (such as /proc -- you don't have to recreate anything under /proc, but you might have to for other dirs) that is excluded must be recreated after a restore and before you reboot, if you are restoring to a freshly formatted partition. I backup all the "junk" in /var that you normally wouldn't want because X writes things it needs out there. It's easier to just back it all up since I have the room on the dat. There are probably better ways. There are backup programs for Linux. None of them quite did what I wanted. You can use dump and restore which will give you incremental backups etc. It's also better to do a complete backup under single user mode so things don't get changed, but I don't bother since I know to stay off when I'm doing backups. If you restore to a freshly formatted partition (booting with boot disk and modified rescue) with this backup, you need to recreate /proc directory and lilo. Do a chroot to where your new partition is mounted, such as chroot /mnt/hda2. This changes you to have that device as "/". Do the restore, then enter lilo at the prompt to write that out. If you need to make a swap file partition also, check out the man page for mkswap and write down what you need. Restore would look something like: (xxxxxx is the label name of the backup. It's the "b${mybck}" between the "-V" and "--same-owner" on the first line of tar in the backup sample below. I have multiple partitions and this restore would format and restore them all, except swap. I'm typing this from memory, so there may be mistakes here.) > mke2fs -c /dev/hda2 > mkdir /mnt/hda2 > mount -t ext2 /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2 > chroot /mnt/hda2 > cd / > mke2fs -c /dev/sda5 > mke2fs -c /dev/sda6 > mkdir /mnt/sda5 > mkdir /usr > mount -t ext2 /dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5 > mount -t ext2 /dev/sda6 /usr > mt -f /dev/st0 rewind > mt -f /dev/st0 compression 1 > mt -f /dev/st0 setblk 0 > tar --totals -R -V xxxxxx --same-owner -b 64 -xvpf /dev/st0 / > mt -f /dev/st0 rewind > mt -f /dev/st0 offline > mkdir /proc > mkdir /c > mkdir /d > lilo reboot backup program: ----cut here----- #!/bin/bash if [ $mybck = "" ]; then echo "no mybck set... remember to set it with"; echo " declare -x mybck=whatever-n in quotes... "; exit; else echo "mybck is ${mybck}" fi # Do the backup. mt -f /dev/st0 rewind mt -f /dev/st0 compression 1 mt -f /dev/st0 setblk 0 echo "backup started..." > /root/b${mybck}.log echo `date` >> /root/b${mybck}.log tar --totals -R -V b${mybck} --same-owner -b 64 -cvpf /dev/st0 / \ --exclude "/proc/*" --exclude "*lost+found/*" \ --exclude "/root/b${mybck}.log" --exclude "/c/*" \ --exclude "/d/*" >> /root/b${mybck}.log mt -f /dev/st0 rewind mt -f /dev/st0 offline echo "backup ended..." >> /root/b${mybck}.log echo `date` >> /root/b${mybck}.log exit ----cut here----