Hi, I was wanting to backup my linux system running debian unstable so I can keep a backup off of my system before I start installing lots of software I want to be able to quickly restore to a usable state with out reinstalling everything. I want to make a backup of just one partition as I have linux on one partition and will be saving the backup to an USB flash drive that will be mounted as well. What I don't want to happen is for the tar program to also backup all mount points and their contents but I do want it to backup the directories on my ext3 filesystem and the directories for the mount points so when I restore the backup there will be empty directories for my USB flash drives and not directories with all of the contents from the drive when the backup was made. What would be the best command to do this and use bzip2 with the minus 9 compression option and preserve permitions and directory structure?
