General :: Backing Up Two Partitions - Fedora 12

On fedora 12 - 1 drive - 2 partitions: a small partition to boot, a big one for all other things - sda1 and sda2.

I would like to use tar to copy them to a different drive. That way I not only back them up but also reorganize them.

(1) approach 1 - 2 drive approach

On second drive (sdb) created 2 partitions with fdisk, used mkfs to put file systems into them.

Easy to do sdb1. I created a directory /target and mounted sdb1 there. Then used tar pipe tar to copy /boot to /target. Appears to be ok.

Not so obvious how to do sdb2. I can mount it at target but

(1) if I copy / to /target there is recursion?? I tried --exclude=/boot --exclude=/target but it went ahead and copied /target.

Also there are a number of things mounted onto / - see output of mount below

Code:
/dev/mapper/vg_knox-lv_root on / type ext4 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)

[Code]....