StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It's maintenance time for my fileserver, I need to install another hard drive (it's time for RAID-0), and update the Operating System. I'm thinking that the best way to do this will just be with a format (it'll get rid of a lot of the crap which has accumulated over the last couple of years, I can setup the RAID array during the installation, and I can get rid of the packages I installed the first time round and don't actually need).

I need to backup the home directories, the web root, and the MySQL databases (unless anyone can think of anything I've missed?), and was planning on just creating archives of all the necassary folders with a
tar -cvf filename.tar directory/file
(not compressed as a 450Mhz PIII would take a while over it), and then copying the resulting file over the network to my desktop, then after the reinstall, copying back and extracting?

Is this the best way of going about this task, or can anyone suggest superior alternatives?

Are you missing /etc?

Probably not a bad idea to get resolv.conf, bearing in mind how much trouble I've had getting the internet connection working before... Most of the other configuration files have only minor changes made to them, or are just plain broken, and therefore can be forgotten I think.

STill good idea for reference

True, I'll grab that as well then...