Hi, Arnold Krille wrote on 2011-09-03 01:32:15 +0200 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up slash partition]: > On Saturday 03 September 2011 00:57:48 Timothy Murphy wrote: > > Can one sensibly back up / with BackupPC?
the confusing thing about that question is that it is probably not what you want to ask. Yes, you *can* back up your file systems from the root, though you will *need* to exclude some things. No, bare metal recovery is not a feature of BackupPC. > The result you get is the same as if you would hard power-off your machine > and restart it. Or take out one drive in your raid1 while its running. Well, no. Firstly, you don't get a snapshot, unless you actually back up a snapshot, i.e. your hard power-off will have occurred at different points in time for different parts of your file systems - maybe even spread out across several hours. It will likely be inconsistent. That is usually not that much of a problem (maybe because nobody does it), but you *should* consider whether it is in your case. Secondly, while you do get an "image" of your system, you need to think about what you would want to do with it. You can't press a button and get a disk as result that you can insert into a replacement machine. At the *very least*, you will need to set up partitioning the target disk, creating the file system(s), and boot loading. All of this is information that is stored on your disk, but outside the file systems. Additionally, your system will be configured for the hardware it was running on. Your replacement may or may not have different requirements. For example, it's very likely that udev will name your network interfaces differently, which can be a major nuisance. Chances are, you will find it easier to reinstall a system from original source media and then restore meaningful data and configuration from your backups. If so, there's not much point in backing up all the binaries (and, say, your WWW proxy's cache). You might say, "if I backup everything, it won't turn out that I forgot something". True, but you might also find that it has some merit to be aware which of your data is valuable and which isn't. > You should make sure you don't cross mount-points though. Otherwise the > backup of localhosts '/' will recurse into itself. How that? Les Mikesell wrote on 2011-09-02 18:36:11 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] Backing up slash partition]: > On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:57 PM, Timothy Murphy <gayle...@eircom.net> wrote: > > Can one sensibly back up / with BackupPC? > > Sure, but if you don't use --one-file-system in the options, be sure > to exclude the pseudo mounts like /proc, /sys (and maybe /dev, > depending on the version). To elaborate, you *need* to exclude /proc (and possibly /sys), else your backup will probably not complete. In the very least, it will contain large amounts of meaningless data (like your kernel core image). Regardless of the version, backing up /dev seems to be pointless. Unless it is both static (does *anyone* still use a static /dev?) and you *really* plan to recover your machine from the backup. What I'd further recommend excluding is /tmp and /media (or whatever your system automatically mounts removable media to). It's always difficult to anticipate everything that might cause problems. This is the real downside of a "backup everything except ..." approach. Another point to consider would be database files, which generally don't handle non-snapshot image level backups particularly well. You might need additional steps (like dumping the database from a DumpPreUserCmd) if you have software like databases running. So, my answer to your question is, "yes, but I wouldn't recommend it". Regards, Holger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free "Love Thy Logs" t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
