dumping the contents of a hard-drive

[Mike Maltese]

> What would you guys say would be the best method of dumping a live file
> system and excluding a certain group of directories(namely /tmp and
> /mnt)?

Well, if /tmp is on it's own partition, you can just omit it from your dump
routine. Otherwise, set the nodump flag. See man chflags. You will have to
use the -h option with dump, so you may also want to take a look at the dump
man page.