[wellylug] what to back up?

[nic]

Thanks everyone: I appreciate the comments and thoughts.

On my own machines I verify the backups by doing md5sum for each file on the backup,. then 
on another machine verify that the md5sums match. These guys don;t do that, but I might be 
able to train them ;)

What does a a 'bare metal' backup include? I presume you don't just do 'tar -jcf 
backup.tar.bz2 /' or similar, because you obviously can't deal with /proc/ sys, /dev, (and 
probably some others). And there's no guarantee the machine they'd be restoring to is the 
same as the one the backup was done on (not even necessarily the same OS: some of their 
machines are running Fedora Core 2!)

Nic

Jethro Carr wrote:
> 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,
> 
> 
> 
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> 
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