For those situations where you've installed something that messed your whole system up, or if you scramble your partition table and have to start over, I have a little utility to suggest. http://dump.sourceforge.net contains Ext2 dump and restore. This is a simple backup utility based on the dump and restore that first appeared in BSD and later got renamed to ufsdump and ufsrestore in Solaris. Basically, it makes backup and restoration fairly simple. It was originally designed for tapes, but can write to files just as easily. It's a bit tricky to install, because it wants to set the owner of the man pages to "man" which seldom exists. Look at the configure options carefully. What I did is to build the package in a statically linked form. Then, I put a copy of this statically linked restore on a floppy. That way, I could get to it from a rescue disk and it would work no matter what libraries are on the rescue disk. It lets you do a full restore or an interactive restore where you can type "ls" and "cd" just like in the shell to navigate the backup and select files. One word of warning, it is slow about restoring single files from the middle of a backup since it's designed for tapes, but there are options to help with this. However, a full or incremental backup and restore are very quick. It can take a 2GB partition and can back it up in about 10 minutes uncompressed on my system. It takes just under 2 hours with compression, but it packs that 2GB into about 790MB with the highest compression enabled. Give it a look. I wish Slackware included it by default, but it doesn't.
