Speaking of tar, Can I use it to BU my win98 partition.

[Jeff Vian]

Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:

>It would appear that on May 11, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook did say:
>
>  
>
>>Thanks again Luciano, I much appreciate the informative explanation.
>>    
>>
>
>-snipped. .  .   .    .     .      .       .        .         .stuff
>
>  
>
>>Thanks
>>    
>>
>
>One more tar question for the expert users... 
>
>Tar is becoming part of my primary back up strategy for all my linux
>partitions. Tar, split & xcdroast works for me! But I'd like to make it
>a complete strategy and even use it to back up my windows stuff...
>
>I can't think of a reason why it can't. I could do some empirical
>testing I suppose. But if I restore my win98 from a tarfile and it
>doesn't work, Id regret it.
>
>Has anybody successfully backed up AND restored a windows filesystem with
>tar. ( I'm talking the whole "C:" drive ) If I ever screw up and let it
>gets infested with something, I'd like to know that I could boot linux
>from a lilo floppy, and:
># shred /dev/hda1
># mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/hda1
># mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mountpoint
># cd /mountpoint
># tar -xzf tarfile.tgz .
># lilo -b /dev/hda
>
>Reboot and select the win98 boot item. And actually have win98 running?
>But I suppose I might have to replace the mkdosfs line with booting from
>a win98 rescue floppy that has the win/dos version of fdisk and format
>on it(with LBA support...) Then reboot into linux and pick up with the
>mount command...
>
>But I would definitely like to use my trustwothy linux to archive my
>win89 file system. 
>
>If this possible???
>  
>
Have you tried mondoarchive?
    http://www.mondorescue.org

I use it and have it set to run from a cron job at night once a week.  A 
full backup monthly, differential backups weekly (this is my home system).
It creates bootable iso images for the backup on hard drive and then I 
use cdrecord to put them onto cd for storage. (It can backup directly to 
the cdrom if you wish, or to tape or an nfs mounted drive.)

A full backup of a system with about 38gb of data takes 18 700mb CDs 
(about 2.1gb of data on each 700mb cd)  It also can be used to do a 
backup of other filesystems that are mounted such as your Win98.

This would be much better than a tar archive because of the ability to 
boot and do a full bare bones recovery. Also with the major compression 
it takes less space, And with less manual work than the tar - split - 
cdrecord routine.

just my $0.02  :-)

Jeff