howto backup

["Steve Poling" <sdp@xxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy,

i've gotten around to doing some fairly serious fixing on my favorite Linux
box. and before i start rearranging partitions and formatting stuff, I want
to run a backup. heretofore, i've simply blown away my Linux hard disks, but
now i've got enuf good stuff on my Linux box that i want to back-up
everything.

What's the best way to backup a partition on my Linux box?

i have a Win98 box with several gigs of empty disk space. so, i suppose that
if i were to build a giga-tar-file i could easily copy it there, do risky
things, or blow away the Linux box entirely, get Samba running again and
then restore my system from this tar file.

1. does this make sense?

2. if so, has anyone done similarly?

3. which programs would best serve this strategy?