Re: [aclug-L] Backing up

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carl D Cravens <raven@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> 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?  

/proc is just a "virtual" filesystem, with live data about what the
system is doing.  It doesn't exist anywhere physically, and in fact,
should be excluded because of /proc/kcore -- the interface to your
RAM.  You probably don't need to back up your RAM :-)

> /var/spool seems kind of pointless.  Now wait a minute... who went and put

/var/spool/mail is under there, and if you're running a mail server,
so is /var/spool/mqueue (although if you don't do frequent backups,
the latter is probably not of any importance.)

> 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?

It's small, but you probably won't need it unless you added custom
devices.

> /cdrom, /floppy, and /mnt are outta there. 
> 
> Anything else I'm not thinking of that should be excluded from my backups?

To save space, perhaps:

  /usr/man
  /usr/share/man
  /usr/doc
  /usr/share/doc
  /var/cache
  ~/.netscape/cache
  ~/.netscape/archive
  /usr/src
  
And possibly:

  /usr/bin
  /usr/X11R6/bin
  /usr/X11R6/lib

etc.

-- 
John Goerzen   Linux, Unix consulting & programming   jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade)       www.debian.org |
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