I have been trying to backup my Ubuntu machine which is a Wubi installed Ubuntu alongside Vista.

So far I have done the following
First I navigated to my external hard-drive then I created a backup folder on this drive and then I entered the following from the terminal:

sudo tar cpf mybackup.tgz2

    --exclude="/host/*" 

    --exclude="/media/*" 

    --exclude="/mnt/*" 

    --exclude="/proc/*" 

    --exclude="/tmp/*" 

    --exclude="/sys/*"

    --exclude="/home/*/gvfs/*" /   (I have also tried, "/home/.../.gvfs")

and the process runs through but eventually gives me this message:
Exiting with failure status due to previous error.

I have seen on this forum, that permission denied, could be a reason for a failure status, also, I visited this site: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/225361, where there is some discussion about .gvfs as having a bug of some sort or another... the discussion is beyond me but it seems this could be the reason that I have a failure notice, (if you go to the end of the discussion on this bug site you will see that Ubuntu 11.10 still has some problem with this issue).

So my question is, does anyone know how I can get around this issue and get a clean reliable backup? I mean a backup with a failure status is not one that inspires me with confidence.

Thanks for any help,

railguide48