On Sunday 11 August 2002 22:28, John J. Boyer wrote: > Hello, I am running a dual-boot machine. Linux and Windows are on separate > drives. My Windows committed suicide, so I'm not worrying about it until I > get a Windows job. However, the Windows drive has lots of room. I would > like to back up my entire Linux system on the Windows drive without having > to change it from VFAT to EXT2. It still has some good data on it. I would > like to be able to put the backup into a directory, with the proper > subdirectories and no compression, so I can refer to it easily. Further > down the road, I would like to burn backup cd's for my Linux system. > however, there is probably more data than will fit on one CD, even if it > is compressed. Hw can I do this? > Thanks. You can just copy the files over, but don't do that as FATxx filesystems don't maintain Unix/Linux metadata. Better alternatives are 1) Use tar (or maybe afio). Examination of the contents is maybe a little more difficult. 2) Make CD images (ISO files). You can mount these and see the contents just like you can a physical CD, and if you use mkisofs with the right options it preserves the Linux metadata. If you want to backup to CD, you can do as in suggestion 2, making sure the images are small enough to fit on your CDs. You can burn them using cdrecord. If you want to maximise the data per CD, use afio. It has options to compress the backup, and to limit the size of the individual files it creates, and the size limit you specify is the media size (not so for tar and other backup programs). -- Cheers John. Please, no off-list mail. You will fall foul of my spam treatment. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb