System Recovery [was Backing up linux system: How to create /dev?]

[Griffith Feeney]

Thanks for both these replies, more below.

>--- Griffith Feeney <gfeeney at hawaii.edu> wrote:
>>I want to secure my linux (Debian 2.2) installation
>>with a backup for recovery (of the system, not particular data) in
>>case of problems. Prefer free to commercial solution. This is a 
>>single user workstation.

At 06:47 PM 12/16/00 -1000, [Robert Green <aloha_moon at yahoo.com>] wrote:
>I am also interested in this info -- perhaps we could
>work on a backup/restore howto with what we come up
>with?

At 09:24 PM 12/16/00 -1000, [kilauea at hsa-kauai.net] wrote:
>Info relating to backup is here, search for "back"
>
>http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/book1.html
>
>LDP is an excellent source for most questions. I use tar but I remember
>reading that cpio is more error tolerant. I'm sure that there are more
>references to backups at LDP but you will need to look around. O'Reilly 
>publishing has a good book for general questions "Running Linux" and 
>"Linux in a Nutshell" is a good reference text. However, it isn't 
>necessary to buy text because LDP has most everything anyway.
>
>Aloha from Kauai, Mark

Thanks for the LDP reference, which led quickly to 

http://www.linuxdoc.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/c1315.html

which gives

tar -zcvpf /archive/full-backup-`date '+%d-%B-%Y'`.tar.gz --directory /
--exclude=mnt --exclude=proc

(see the link for details). This doesn't work but after absurdly many hours
of reading books and man files and experimenting I find that the same thing
less '--directory' does seem to work. Can anyone confirm that '--directory'
doesn't belong there (or should it be '--directory=/')? I used a simpler
command to test,

tar -zcvpf /archive/test.tar.gz / --exclude=usr

along with a bunch of other excludes because I don't have disk space
immediately handy for the whole thing.

This does seem to answer the question of how to make an archive of your
system, and (in the end) simply.

There remains the question of how to restore the system from the archive.
I'm content to assume for now that the partition (my system is on a single
partition) is intact, so that it is necessary only to boot a system that
can restore the archive file to it.

The Nov 2000 Linux Journal has an article on 'Bare Metal Recovery How-To'
(not online, unfortunately), which I need to study further. It should give
the answer, or most of it. It's more complicated that one would like. For
the present, at least, I'm content to restore from another disk on the same
system, recognizing that a power supply failure could destroy them all.