How do you copy the entire contents of a boot drive?

[arbilad]

I want to copy all the contents off my dieing clamshell ibook onto a firewire harddrive. Since the power socket is loose on the motherboard (my assumption, but I need to jiggle the plug in the socket to get it to power), I'm going to be giving up on this particular computer and want all information backed up. I know that with OS 9 I could simply drag the hard drive icon onto the other one and copy most relevant information, except for perhaps certain files in the system software. Would that work in OS X?
I've never been successful in booting up off of this firewire drive, so how do I copy the contents of the currently running boot drive? I'm fairly comfortable with the Bash command line, so if that's the best option I'll do it from there. Would a simple cp -r *.* firewiredrive do it?

 

[billbaloney]

I would cd /; tar cf /Volumes/Firewiredrive/backup.tar * -- a good, reliable method. That's what tar was written for, after all. To save space on your remote drive, you can do cd /; tar czf /Volumes/Firewiredrive/backup.tgz *

You could also get something like SuperDuper.

 

[artov]

On my Linux machine, I used cpio to do this. I used something like

# find / -depth -print0 | cpio --null -pvd /mnt/new-dir

That is, find all files that are on same disk as /, print their name, pipe it
to cpio, which copies the file to the new drive (mounted on /mnt/new-dir).

But, catch is, Linux uses gnu version of find and cpio. Gnu find has -print0,
which terminates filenames with NUL (ascii code 0). Ok, OS X comes with
find that also has -print0, BUT OS X cpio does not have the --null option.

You could try

# find / -depth -print | cpio -pvd /mnt/new-dir

but there can come files that have some funny characters (NUL cannot be
in file name, so GNU version will copy all files).