Les Mikesell wrote: > OK, but why should it hurt anything to have the destination > file system have a copy of the running source system? Shouldn't > anything necessary be reconstructed and anything else not > matter? If you can't restore a working system from a tar > backup a lot of people have a big problem. That's a very good question - in fact, more or less the same question. You will have to exclude some directories, eg /proc, if you do this; so the same question arises, which do you exclude? Actually, I didn't try tar on this occasion. I used rsync simply because it is easier to exclude directories with this, although I know it is possible with tar also. Well, there was another reason for using rsync; I thought some problem might arise during the copy, and rsync would allow me to resume. But is there actually any difference between rsync and tar for this purpose? -- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
