From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 27 11:26:23 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DEAA737B401 for ; Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:26:21 -0800 (PST) Received: from above.proper.com (mail.proper.com [208.184.76.45]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4A06343E4A for ; Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:26:21 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from phoffman@proper.com) Received: from [165.227.249.18] (165-227-249-18.client.dsl.net [165.227.249.18]) by above.proper.com (8.11.6/8.11.3) with ESMTP id h0RJQ1o25142; Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:26:01 -0800 (PST) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: phoffprop@mail.proper.com Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <20030126195713.G17637-100000@zoraida.natserv.net> References: <20030126195713.G17637-100000@zoraida.natserv.net> X-Habeas-SWE-1: winter into spring X-Habeas-SWE-2: brightly anticipated X-Habeas-SWE-3: like Habeas SWE (tm) X-Habeas-SWE-4: Copyright 2002 Habeas (tm) X-Habeas-SWE-5: Sender Warranted Email (SWE) (tm). The sender of this X-Habeas-SWE-6: email in exchange for a license for this Habeas X-Habeas-SWE-7: warrant mark warrants that this is a Habeas Compliant X-Habeas-SWE-8: Message (HCM) and not spam. Please report use of this X-Habeas-SWE-9: mark in spam to . Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 08:22:20 -0800 To: Francisco Reyes , Mike Meyer From: Paul Hoffman Subject: Re: Which files and directories to backup? Cc: FreeBSD Questions List Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 8:16 PM -0500 1/26/03, Francisco Reyes wrote: >On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Mike Meyer wrote: > >> It's a bad idea to exclude fstab. > >Why? At one point I had it included and it actually clobered a working one >and just caused much more headaches. You should still back it up; you just need to be more careful with your restores. The same will be true for many of the files in /etc. >Other files won't create as much headaches as fstab if copied over by >mistake. You say that now, but I would bet that for many people, restoring an old rc.conf would be more prone to making them yell "Doh!" than restoring an old fstab. In other words, you are better off doing more complete backups and just being that much more careful when you do restores. You can also do backups very often to minimize the problems of a backup being too old. I back up something similar to what you have listed here (with fewer exceptions of directories because most of the things you carefully excluded are really small) every week, and always just before I do a major upgrade. I then shove the backup offsite via ftp. Much of what you are backing up is quite compressable, so you should most likely be using 'tar -czf' instead of just 'tar -cf' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message