[wellylug] what to back up?

[Jethro Carr]

On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 15:22 +1200, nic wrote:
> 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

hi Nick,

You question really depends on what applications you are running on the
system, and how they have been configured. :-)

If you have the backup capacity, naturally a full system backup is best.

Otherwise, you should backup all the data and configuration, which
should be the following:
/var/
/etc/
/home/

Backing up /etc/ is actually really important - it can take a
considerable amount of time and hassle to reconfigure a server, and
the /etc data is usually less than 25MB.

Another very important issue to consider, is how you verify that the
backups are valid. There's nothing worse that going to restore from
backup to find out they are all corrupt.... :-)


cheers,

-- 
Jethro Carr

www.jethrocarr.com
www.jethrocarr.com/index.php?cms=blog

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