[gentoo-dev] Three questions about making a backup of Gentoo.

[Mike Verdone]

In my last post I mentioned I was going to install Gentoo - well, I did, 
and I love it. Nice work, guys!

The downside was that it took a few days to get it to the level I like, 
and a lot of compile time. So, I want to make a backup of my current 
system. I was just going to do "tar -cjvpf backup.tgz2 /" from the 
rescue/install cd while chrooted in my system.

1) Is that a safe and good thing to do?

2) Can I delete the contents of /usr/portage/distfiles? There's about 
350mb there that I don't really need.

3) If I unmerge the kernel source, will that affect the running kernel? 
Will it mess up future package installs?

Thanks for all your help,

Mike.