> > What I have tried in the past is to clone the harddisk using the harddisk > upgrade howto method, but that involves taking the machine completely > offline, also cutting an image with Ghost means taking the machine offline. > So I am not sure what your resources are, but it seems that all of the answers you've gotten up to now presuppose that you have some sort of tape drive or hard disk that you will 'dump' your filesystem on. If on the other hand you don't have such a resource then compression is an issue. I use the good old: tar --exclude /tmp --exclude /home/tmp czpPf <tar-ball-file-name> / to backup my laptop and then burn the tar-balls on DVD. I had to do a system restore once and from the mounted DVD you just do: tar xzpPf <tar-ball-file> and you are done. In one single DVD I can fit four system backups (one every month) but of course the process is slower when reading from the DVD so usually I keep a copy of the last backup tar-ball on the disk. F.
