[clue-admin] Advice admin newb on doing a System backup

[Dave W.]

Hello,
  I want to learn how to make a system recovery disk(s) for my company's 
dev. server.  This is what I've figured so far as a plan.

For the initial compression: boot the server via a liveCD with tools I 
need.

Tar/compress root to a temporary folder then if >4.4GB span the file 
over multiple disks (not sure how to do that, but I got idea's)

Using some sort of tool I don't know of yet (but I am sure exists), make 
differential saves of / and /boot every sunday via a cron script.

What I got to work with:
2x (2.8GHZ Xeon's)
~4GB ddr2
500GB hardware raid mirrored SCSI (2x500GB 10K SCSI)
Gentoo 2006.1 - Kernel 2.6.17r8
Dell Utility Partition ~= 100MB
/boot ~=1GB (I was being optimistic) using ext2
swap ~= 2GB (4GB ram / 2)
/ ~= 450GB using reiserfs

Users: 2 programmer/Admin's

This machine is half a development server and half a training ground for 
me, any mistake I make here will be an annoyance but it won't set my 
company back financially unless I can smoke the server somehow(I heard 
besides being fired, you get a medal for accomplishing that)

Any advice or pointers to a informative guide/howto would be much 
appreciated.

-David