From the howto: http://www.faqs.org/docs/securing/chap29sec305.html I got some ideas to help me to tar up the OS. I had already been shown how to wrap it into SSH to deposit the tar file on another system, so I tried the following: tar cpvzf - -C / --exclude home --exclude media --exclude mnt --exclude proc --exclude */lost+found | ssh root at 10.0.0.2 "cat>backup-060907.tgz" But, whereas the howto is talking about --exclude dealing with files, the Centos Man on tar is saying that it applies to files. So what is wrong? I know the SSH stuff is correct as when I put in something like ls I get a file with result of the ls. Also I had done this without the excludes and of course it died slowing when it got to /media/cdrom :(