[TriLUG] Failing hard drives (laptops)

[Alan Porter]

> Do I need to worry about /dev/?  When I untar the tarball onto
> the new disk, what do I need to do so that Debian Sarge will
> have all of its devices available?  Should I get /dev/ from the
> tarball, or can I regenerate them on boot?

It is safe to tar up /dev along with the rest of your backup.  They
will be treated as device node files, and the CONTENTS of the
devices will not be included in your tarball.

The same can not be said for /proc.

As a general rule, when I am backing up an entire system, I will
skip /proc, any swap files that I may have (I use /.swap), and the
ext3 journal file (in /.journal ??).

Back to the /dev question, if you are running devfs or udev, then
you will not need to back up /dev, but doing so will not hurt
anything.  By default, Sarge does not use either of these... it uses
a traditional /dev directory with individual device files.

Alan



.