Debian Potato (Frozen) with Slink KDE. I want to be able to backup my linux system to scsi tape (nst0) such that, if my hard drive falls into little pieces one bright sunny day, I can boot from a rescue floppy and restore the lot onto a new drive without having to re-install anything.
I can certainly do this with OS/2 ( I did have to do it once - it's amazing what lightning can do) and I'm hoping it is possible with linux. I plan to use afio for the backup in conjunction with the Tomsrtbt rescue floppy (an amazing piece of work). Naturally I have some questions otherwise you wouldn't be reading this! Most parts of the system are straightforward and I could include mount point directories, such as /cdrom, as long as there is nothing actually mounted then they would, at least, be automatically re-created. I wouldn't need to backup /tmp. What about /dev? Could the device files be backed up without backing up the contents of the said devices? I did see once that Midnight Commander could copy a complete linux system onto another partition so I assume that backing up the /dev directory could be done. I'm assuming that the contents of /proc, including any sub-directories, are generated each time at startup and all that would need to be done would be to re-create the actual directory. You are now most welcome to pick my assumptions to pieces and/or make suggestions. Barry Samuels
