Backing up a Gentoo installation
Before sending my laptop off to IBM I needed to back everything up. I run Gentoo Linux on my Thinkpad and given the amount of time it takes to do an install from scratch, I’d rather avoid having to do it all again if the guys at IBM decide to wipe my disk. Thankfully I’m not the only one. A chap on the Gentoo Forums has written a script that will create a stage 4 tarball of your existing setup. The post with the script can be found here:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-312817.html
For those of you who don’t use Gentoo, the initial part of the installation is broken up into 3 stages. They setup things like the disk partitions, network settings, etc. More details can be found in the Gentoo Handbook. The end of stage 3 is basically where you start installing all your app software, e.g. X, KDE, Evolution, etc.
After editing a few variables in the script, it ran without a hitch. After verifying the contents of the tar ball I packaged up my Thinkpad for its trip back to IBM. I’m half curious to find out how smoothly the restore process goes, but I’d much rather just have my hard disk intact.
