On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 20:00, Mark Knecht wrote: > I have two drives at his site, one internal and one external. I've > set things up for me to do manual backups of the system to the second > drive. (/etc and /home only for now. - comments on other things I should > be backing up?) Anyway, I now want to figure out how I could rebuild the > machine from here should it ever fail.
I just implemented a HDD based backup scheme for my home network. Basically I have a cron job that makes a level 0 backup on Sunday morning, and a level 1 backups Monday through Saturday. My two laptops are backed up manually. I backup everything EXCEPT what is in my /etc/backup/exclude list (ie /dev, /proc, /mnt, /sys, /tmp, /var, /var/tmp, /home/mp3). Using an exception list is safer than an include list because if you forget to put something on an exception list, you end up with more data than you wanted. If you forget something on an include list, then you're screwed. Everyone will tell you that it is important to make regular backups, what is often overlooked is making backups of important meta data. I have a script that just dumps all meta data it can find. It dumps, the network configuration, the partition tables and /etc/fstab, hardware information, kernel config, DMI and BIOS data, and the output of /usr/lib/portage/bin/pkglist. This is a plain text file that is uploaded to my web server so I can always get to it. You never know when you might need your fine tuned kernel config. You might think this is overkill, but I recently had the unfortunate pleasure of testing my backup scheme when the drive on my gentoo based server suddenly died. My backup was complete enough that I was able to boot off a LiveCD, partition the drive, restore the files, install GRUB and reboot. It took me an hour to get the server to a booting system and another couple hours to run 'emerge -uD world'. (I don't normally run 'emerge -uD world' on my server) My advice is to do whatever you need to do to sleep comfortably at night. Someone wiser than me once said, "a good backup system should not depend on a human brain to do something." Quattro -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
