04-07-2006, 03:07 PM
Well, you certainly learned about recursion!
The nature of the UNIX filesystem is that / is the root. Backing that up and everything on it implies that the entire hard drive (and all partitions) will be backed up.
If you are backing up to the same machine, you might want to read the 'tar' man page. Tar will capture all the information needed to recreate a directory and its contents exactly as found. It also takes options that allow you to exclude certain directories ( /dev/ , /Volumes/ , /automount/ , /Network/ and /.vol/ all come to mind as do-not-copy candidates ), restrict archiving to a single volume, and allows you to specify where the tar output goes--to a file or a pipe.
MacOS X tar is the GNU tar, and should be from the same code base as Linux' tar.
The nature of the UNIX filesystem is that / is the root. Backing that up and everything on it implies that the entire hard drive (and all partitions) will be backed up.
If you are backing up to the same machine, you might want to read the 'tar' man page. Tar will capture all the information needed to recreate a directory and its contents exactly as found. It also takes options that allow you to exclude certain directories ( /dev/ , /Volumes/ , /automount/ , /Network/ and /.vol/ all come to mind as do-not-copy candidates ), restrict archiving to a single volume, and allows you to specify where the tar output goes--to a file or a pipe.
MacOS X tar is the GNU tar, and should be from the same code base as Linux' tar.