Mondo Rescue, missingdev,proc,sys 2585

Again, I admit this is not especially neat, and people can make theoretical arguments as to whether it should be tweaked in varyingly painstaking ways, but it works well for me, and takes less than a half hour for a 10-15GB system:

(1) Boot either a live CD, a rescue CD, or a minimal installation on a separate parbreastion.

(2) From your headers it looks like you're using Fedora, and the Fedora installer disk has a "rescue" option that will mount your entire installation undermnt-sysimage - e.g.boot will be onmnt-sysimage-boot,dev onmnt-sysimage-dev, and so on. Some live CDs will automatically mount various temporary directories named after the parbreastions. The procedure is slightly different depending on the mounting scheme.

(3) Either way, you need at least one writable device that is not part of the system you are backing up, and is big enough to hold a tar.gz copy of it - a system totaling between about 10GB and 15GB will fit on a device the size of a single-sided DVD, i.e. about 4500MB. For example, and empty 5GB hard disk parbreastion would be useful for a system of that size; you could put the tar file on that and then burn it to a DVD later if you had a DVD burner. I'll just use that example to illustrate, but what exactly would be involved in your case would depend on what hardware was available and how big the system was that you were backing up.

(4). Supposing for the sake of illustration that your backup device isdev-sda1:

# umountdev-sda1

(if it is mounted to begin with - so you don't try to back up the backup itself).

# mkdirmnt && mkdirmnt-backup

(buttuming they don't exist already)

# mountdev-sda1mnt-backup

(5) Mount the parbreastions you want to back up, if necessary, but this should not be necessary if you are using the rescue CD or a live Cd that automatically mounts the filesystems it finds.

(5). Copy theetc-fstab of the running system (e.g. from the live CD) to tomnt-backup; you may need it when and if you restore from the backup in order to make sure the target parbreastions are mounted in the same places then as they are now.

(6) Create the tar file. For example,

If you are using a Fedora rescue CD,

# tar -zcvfmnt-backup-foo.tar.gzmnt-sysimage

Or if you are using a live CD that had the parbreastions mounted onfoo-bar-hda1,foo-bar-hda2, etc.:

# tar -zcvfmnt-backup-foo.tar.gzfoo-bar

(7) Store the tar file and the fstab file from the live CD wherever you want to keep the backup, if that is some place other than where you just created it. For example, you might boot the system you just backed up and use its DVD buring software if you have a DVD burner.

(8) To restore the system, boot the live or rescue CD or whatever, and then create, format, and-or mount as necessary any parbreastions described in the fstab you copied from the live system when you made the backup (creating the required mount points if they do not already exist at that point). Then mount the device that has the tar file on it, and, for example:

# cd # tar -zxvfmedia-dvdwriter-foo.tar.gz

(9) If you completely reformatted the target parbreastions, you may also have to reinstall the bootloader to make the target system bootable again.