I did a quick search on the forums. Found three results and didn't find any thing help.
I am Windows Guy and have never really touched Linux. I have a friend who's disk drive is failing and needs to backup there redhat box. The most experience I have in Linux is a botched attempt to install ubuntu on a system.

I would really appreciate any help you guys can offer. I know you guys don't know the exact setup of hardware/software the box is running (I will provide as I can). I would just appreciate some general instructions on how to get off the ground and running on this (so to speak).

Thank you in advance for your time and advice.

-Chevyman

In part, it depends on the type of filesystem that is used. In most cases you can use dump/restore. Some filesystems can not be backed up with the normal dump command (ReiserFS, for example).

If you have the same disk, you can use "dd" to copy all of the data, but this will typically take a long time since it copies the whole disk, regardless of how much data is actually used.

If you install a new disk and partition it, you can use dump and pipe it to restore to duplicate the disk. Something like:

"dump 0f - / | restore -rf -"

when the current directory is in the new partition.

You can also dump it to a file on a single partition, to be restored later:

dump 0f /DIR/root.dump /


It is also possible to use rdist, rsync and/or tar to copy all the files, but dump/restore retains the most information (device nodes, hard links, etc.).

an option for backing up is partimage, you can create a complete image and transfer it onto another drive,
its a lot quicker than doing a re-install

http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

Thanks for the information and replies!

Just like a PC, there's a difference between Backing Up Users and System Level Backups.

As noted above, the filesystem type can be an issue.
The filesystem independent backup for User's data is the TAR program with compression.
Then if needed, you can boldly reinstall the Linux and recover the user files

The Backup

su 'tar czf - /home >/tmp/bkup.yyyymmdd'

Create a compressed(z) archive to standard out (hence the redirected output to the bkup file in /tmp
and capture the /home directory. The ROOT login is required to record the UID and file perms of all files

The Restore

cd /home ; su 'tar xvf /tmp/bkup.yyyymmdd'

Position the cwd to the directory to receive the files and use ROOT to extract the contents of the archive.