Good Morning All, I found this script on a newbie site. The intent is to show one manner in which to backup your system; and actually the backing up was just to provide an example of things that one can do with shell scripting. I see that it backs up the /etc and /home directories....(actually just one users home directory in this case) and I see that it could be extended to back up anything provided that the user did an su first so that there would not be a rights issue encountered. Also, it seems to assume that a full system backup has been successfully completed at some time in the relatively recent past. Either that or it is assuming that the administrator would perform a fresh install and then restore the files to the new existing directories and overwrite everything.
My question is twofold: What is your opinion of this method, and if you feel that is it lacking then how would you improve it? and Are there other vital directories that have been left out that are needed? This would probably apply to doing a fresh install and then restoring the backed up directories. I'm making the assumption by my description of a "full system backup in the relatively recent past" that this describes a full backup that has been performed after the latest software has been installed but probably not since the latest configuration change (hopefully only changing the details of files contained within the /etc directory) Anyone care to bite this one and chew for a while? <----------below this line is the script----------> #/bin/bash mkdir /tmp/backups cp -rpvf /etc/ /tmp/backups cp -rpvf /home/newbie /tmp/backups tar -cvzf /tmp/saveme.tar.gz /tmp/backups rm -rf /tmp/backups echo your new backup file is complete....it is /tmp/saveme.tar.gz echo please place it somewhere nice and safe like a CDR exit <---------above this line is the script----------> TIA for any ideas, insights, and opinions, Cleve
