Bill Smith wrote:
andy wrote:
David Brodbeck wrote:
On Dec 5, 2007, at 8:12 AM, Michael Pobega wrote:
I'm trying to write a shell script to use tar for backups, but I
want to
know; Which directories are nessecary to backup with tar and which
aren't? Obviously /bin, /usr, /home, /boot, /lib, /srv (Where I keep
all of my chroots) and /etc are, but are any of the other directories
mandatory to backup? Or are any of these directories fruitless to
backup?
The answer is, "it depends." How much custom configuration have you
done? How fast does the system need to be back in service?
For desktop machines that have basically stock installations, I
often only back up /home and /etc, plus maybe /var/www if the
machine has a web server. I don't see any point in using up space
backing up binaries that I can easily reinstall from the Debian
CDs. But on a system where I've built lots of local software or
done lots of custom scripting, backing up the binaries makes more
sense.
Excluding /tmp and /var/tmp makes sense. So does excluding data
caches -- /var/cache/apt, your squid cache directory if you're
running squid, maybe even web browser caches if you're pinched for
space. On systems that run udev, backing up /dev is also fruitless,
although it doesn't really take up much space. And you should
always exclude /proc. It's not a "real" filesystem anyway.
Just to wade in here, since the OP has asked a question that is also
topical for me now:
I'd be wanting to do a back-up from my own machine to an external USB
HDD as well as from a second machine connected to the LAN, both using
Debian. I would want to save a back up of /home and /etc initially
and then a weekly incremental back up of anything that has changed in
the meantime. I don't need the encryption and don't really need the
compression (the USB HDD is 500GB which can easily swallow both of
the HDDs being backed up).
A number of suggestions as to the best program to use for backing up
have been made, but many sound like they are overkill for my
purposes. All I would need is something simple (like me :) ) and
reliable. Any recommendations for this purpose?
I use rsback, which is just a very handy backend to rsync, it produces
incremental backups
from the main server, 2 samba shares and all the homes with the imap
mail to a second server
it is backed up onto another samba share on the second machine, so the
people in the office
can they copy it off onto external drives to take home.
I just run it through a series of cron jobs every night, no problems
at all.
HTH
Thanks
Andy
Thanks Bill - as I stated, I want something that is straightforward and
will do incremental back ups, so if this does the trick then I will
experiment with both rsync as well as with rsback.
Many thanks
Andy
--
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the
answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
