Dan Farrell wrote:
On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:26:07 -0700
Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Do you back up anything other than /etc and /home on a standard
system?
- Grant
Don't forget to back up stuff that can help you rebuild the system
quickly. Like /proc/config.gz, or better yet just the kernel and
modules you need so you don't have to rebuild at all or generate the
sources.
Another thing that I think is highly valuable to back up, and very
often ignored, is the output of 'fdisk -l'. If your drive dies it's
very nice to have a reminder of how it was formatted.
In order to be able to restore a system (relatively) quickly, I use the
appropriate fs dump tool (xfsdump in my case) to make level 0 backups of
/boot, / , /usr, /var after a major configuration change (e.g emerge
--sync;emerge -u world), along with output from df -m. This does not
take too long (/usr does take a while), but really speeds up a restore
(I have sufficient packages installed to make an emerge world take > 10
hours).
For a modern server with minimal software actually installed, the time
aspect for this method may not be too different from an install from
scratch, but it also guarantees that the restored system is the same as
it was before (modulo last backup obviously), which can save a lot of time!
Cheers
Mark
P.s : Actually rebuilding from these saved dumps requires a little
thought - I'll post the steps if anyone new to dumps is interested in
using this method for themselves.
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