I found this on an old posting from 2006 about how to back up and restore your Ubuntu machine.
http://www.arsgeek.com/2006/10/18/how-to-back-up-and-restore-your-ubuntu-machine/

First they suggest changing to your external hard drive with:

cd/media/Free* (Freeagent is my external hard drive.)

Then mkdir ubuntu_backup or some such name.

Change to that directory and then:
sudo tar cvpzf ubuntusettings.backup.tgz2 --exclude="/tmp/" / (The ubuntusettings is my backup's name.)

The switches are:

• c = create


• v = verbose


• p = preserve permission


• z = bzip2


• f = file


• --exclude is just the folders you want to exclude.

I tried it out, and it does begin to back-up; but what I noticed is that it was backing up my entire laptop...that includes Windows. I did not want that but rather I am wondering if anyone knows how to modify this so that it only backs up the Ubuntu section of my laptop? I have Ubuntu for Windows installed on a Vista machine.