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Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:14:22 -0500 (CDT)
From: "John Almberg" <jalmberg@identry.com>
To: "Jeffrey Goldberg" <jeffrey@goldmark.org>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: What should be backed up?
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QUOTE

My general advice is to back up everything and then explicitly
excluding those things that you know that you don't need.  Here is my
exclude list from my rsnapshot.conf

  exclude         /var/log
  exclude         /var/tmp
  exclude         /usr/obj
  exclude         /usr/ports/distfiles
  exclude         /usr/local/squid

Also I backup by file system, so I'm already excluding /tmp

UNQUOTE

Interesting...

That raises another question... How feasible is it to restore a server
from these backups? Is it really possible to install 7.2 on a new machine
and then just copy the backed up data onto the new machine?

I guess I should really verify the value of my backups by trying to do
exactly that!

-- John