Best procedure for full backup of live system

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, Nerius Landys wrote:

> My question is, what is the recommended procedure of taking a full
> backup on a live system?  Ideally, if my hard drive were to crash, I
> would like to have such a backup so as to make it possible to copy
> over the entire backup to a new identical harddrive without doing any
> reinstall or configuration.  Should I use tar/gzip?  dump?  What exact
> command should I use?

dump(8) with the -L option will take a snapshot of a live filesystem and 
then back that up.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA