[wellylug] what to back up?

nic nic at tymar.com
Fri Aug 24 15:22:49 NZST 2007


Hi people

I have quite a lot to do with a bunch of key Linux servers. I'm not quite responsible for 
them, but I do get asked things like 'what should we be backing up?'.

I know the obvious data directories, but I was thinking about the other things that are 
less obvious, like /etc, /var/spool/cron, and /usr/local/bin (of course people only put 
their dedicated scripts there...)

What else would you experts suggest? Would you bother with /etc, or just take some key files?

I don't think there's a requirement to have a replacement machine up and running in 5 
minutes. I'd expect they'd be happy with a couple of hours to load the OS, restore from 
tape (or another machine) and some manual configuration, but it's the references for the 
manual configuration, or the raw files so that the amount of configuration can be 
minimised, that I'm interested in.

And if it makes any difference to your suggestions, there is a _lot_ of capacity on their 
tape system, so the odd 100 Mb here or there doesn't matter too much

All comments appreciated

Nic C-L






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