Tape backup of whole system: which dirs to leave out?

[NotExcessive]

I want to back up the whole machine onto tape, but have noticed KDat never "finishes" backing up when I select everything because there are obviously locked files it waits forever to get access to. Apart from /dev, /proc, and /sys, which other directories do I need to leave out of the backup?

[fangorn]

You have to leave /dev, /proc and /sys out of the backup, as there are some "files" that can get pretty big (/dev/urandom or /dev/null for example )

You CAN leave /tmp and /var/tmp out of the backup, as there are no important configurations in these, just temporary files. KDE for example keeps some links in /tmp open, AFAIK for kioslaves.

Also you can avoid your portage tree and distfiles from beeing saved as they will probably be out of date when you need the backup

I would do a backup of the /home directory seperate from the system, as it changes more often, but that is just me.
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