From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Sep 22 14:51:12 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (zoom2-063.telepath.com [216.14.2.63]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4A27337B423 for ; Fri, 22 Sep 2000 14:51:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 89468 invoked by uid 100); 22 Sep 2000 21:50:29 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14795.54309.457447.943449@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:50:29 -0500 (CDT) To: "Elitetek" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: a few questions... In-Reply-To: <74768148@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Elitetek writes: > second, im using a script file to tar selected directories for backup, and > wanted > to get some opinions > for now im just backing up > /root > /etc > /var > /usr/local > /sbin > /usr/home > /usr/src/sys/i386/conf That's not enough stuff to generate a bootable system. No kernel, no devices, etc. Personally, I wouldn't back up /dev with tar, but I'm paranoid. It's not at all clear what you're trying to do with the backup, either. > is there anything i should add or remove from that list? Depends on the goal. Do you want to be able to recreate the system from backups, or from the distribution CDROM + backups? If the former, you need to put everything on the backup - root and all. If the latter, you don't need /sbin, and most of the stuffin /var, /etc or /root. However, if you did a default install, or otherwise didn't dump everything on the root file system, it should be relatively small. In that case, I'd recommend backing up the entire root file system with dump, then adding the dump file to your tar backup. That will eliminate /root, /etc, /sbin and possibly /var. If nothing goes into /usr/local but packages, you don't need to back that up if you're going to reinstall from CDROM. You do need to back up /var (which you're doing) so you have a know what was installed. Saving a copy of the distfiles (if you build from ports) is a good idea. If you're installing packages from the CDROM, you've already got them. Config files on /usr/local you've edited need to be dealt with. Ideally, you've got a list of what you've changed, how you changed it, and why, so you don't really need to back them up Personally, I store every config file I touch in a source control system, complete with revision history - and then make sure I back up the database for it. That includes the things in /usr/src/sys/i386/conf. If you do all the above, keep the root dump and the source control system database in /usr/home somewhere, all you have to tar up is /usr/home. You should then be able to recreate your system after a total failure on a fressh from whats on the tar image. > i want to have backups if my system should fail/and or is hacked Failures are (usually) easy to detect, and just having your recent tar image would fix it. Hacking is harder to detect, and you may need to go back to an older backup - or reinstall from scratch - to fix that. Proper treatment is a bit complex for an already to-long message.