> IIRC tar doesn't handle special files, you know, dev's, pipes, stuff > like that. What you want is dump/restore. Dump/restore might yield better performance, but tar most certainly does the job. For example: # cd /tmp # tar -cf- -C /dev hda1 | tar -xf- # ls -l hda1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 3, 1 May 5 1998 hda1 Ian