Documentation problem/Full backup

[Henrik Treadup]

Hi 

I've been trying to back up my complete system. A full dump or a level-0
backup in your terminology. The problem is that I don't know what flags to 
use. 

I've asked a unix guru about this and he said something like:
"With tar that would probably be difficult use ufsdump instead." 

The problem with this is that I don't have ufsdump on my system. It seems to 
be a solaris only program. I can't find a free (libre) version. So ufsdump 
is worthless for me. 

No problem I'll use tar anyway. Tried just -cjf but the permissions/owners 
got messed up. (On a positive not the archive file was only about 250 megs 
which can easilly be burned to a cd.) The file conents are the same but the
meta information (permissions/owners etc) for each file gets changed. This 
doesn't really matter if you are just distributing an archive contaning text 
files but the meta info is really important when you are trying to backup 
your OS. 

After a couple of nights reading the info file I still don't know
how to do it. 

I think I should use the --numeric-owner when taring and 
--perserve-permissions when untaring but I'm not sure. 

I guess I could write my own program that can record/save uid, gid, and 
atimes and permissions for each file on my system. The backup procedure 
would go something like this. 

1) Record meta info
2) Tar system.
3) Burn to CD
3) Untar system
3) Restore meta info 

This seems like a lot of work however. Shouldn't I be able to do this 
directly with tar? 

If I'm having problems getting this from the manual you can bet that there 
are other non sysadmin types who aren't getting it either. 

I'd be willing to work on the manual if you can help me with this ;) 

/Henrik Treadup
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