RC levels

[Tom Allison <tallison@tacocat.net>]

I'm trying to set up backups for my computers and I think I've worked 
myself into a small corner between a rock and a hard place.

In order to do "good" backups, I should to 'telinit 1' to kill off all 
the processes I can.

I am trying to backup headless machines, so having a local terminal 
isn't really an option...

I thought about a script that would do a pseudo-program of:
telinit 1
mount external backup device
dump backups
umount
telinit 3

I am making backups to USB devices.  When they are plugged in, they tend 
to have sometimes inconsistent device names.  /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1 have 
both been the right one.

So, I guess I need to either figure out one of the following:

make my device always come up on the same /dev/ or modify rc2 to kill 
everything except for ssh so I can do a remote shell into the computer.

I don't know if I can modify rc2 and still keep my installations 
reasonable.  When debian installs packages (services like postfix) it 
will put rc links into rc2 through rc5.  Is there some way to block these?

Any other suggestions on how to do this?

This also seques into a problem of fsck on a headless machine when root 
maintenance is required.....

help?