[aclug-L] Backing up

[Carl D Cravens <raven@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

My entire Linux mailing list and web server takes up less than 500M, so
right now I'm wanting to back the whole thing up via a tar file, which
will be transferred to another machine to be burned to CD-R.  (The CD
burner is in my Windows machine.)  

I have a few questions about *what* to back up, or more specifically, what
*not* to.  

/tmp, /var/tmp are obvious candidates.  

How about /proc?  Assuming that a full restore is going to require
re-installing the core OS from scratch, these will just get rebuilt,
right?  As root, can I stupidly delete this, and if so, rebuild it without
a backup?  

/var/spool seems kind of pointless.  Now wait a minute... who went and put
*crontabs* in /var/spool?  I thought /var/spool was for *spools*, not
configuration data!  (Even if the man page calls them "spool files", they
aren't.)  I think everything in /var/spool should be *temporary* and
ultimately disposable.  Sigh.  Anything *else* in /var/spool that might
need backed up?  

What about /dev?  Everything should get rebuilt on a re-install, but can
(should?) I back it up uncase I get a little too wild with rm?

/cdrom, /floppy, and /mnt are outta there. 

Anything else I'm not thinking of that should be excluded from my backups?

Thanks!

--
Carl (raven@xxxxxxxxxxx)