[Techtalk] Backup solutions

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Apr 26, 2002 at 02:15:21PM -0400 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Terri Oda thought:
> At 09:47 AM 25/04/02 -0400, Davis, Jennifer wrote:
> >/home/
> >/usr/local/
> >/var/spool/
> >/var/www/
> >/etc/rc.d/
> >/usr/src/linux/.config
> >(at least for my distro (Slackware 8.0)
> 
> I would do all of /etc and anywhere else that config files are 
> stored.  I've found this helpful -- if a box is compromised, I may not want 
> to copy them over, but having them there to do diffs on is very 
> useful.  Although it's not too hard to reconfigure stuff once you've done 
> it once, if
> anything goes wrong you'll be kicking yourself for not having the record of 
> "what worked last time".
 
Especially if you had to fight with your XF86Config like I did!

> If you have any databases of note on your machine, make sure they're backed 
> up to.  I have mysql databases which I actually run dbdump on to back up 
> (it handles the locking and it's really easy to recreate a database from 
> the text file generated -- I've used these backups to make a duplicate copy 
> for testing purposes too.)
 
Oh yes, I'll second that.  If you have any sort of real database, it's a
Bad Idea (TM) to mess with the database's files using anything other than
the database management system (DBMS).  It should have an export for backup
facility which is the only safe way to backup a database.  If you mess
with these files using other tools, the DBMS can cget *very* confused...

> >What I was thinking of doing was a cron job to put these into a tgz file and
> >keep as many of these files as the backup computer will hold.  The only
> >thing I have not figured out is how do I stop the tar program from following
> >the links, ie from my home directory to the /var/www/htdocs directory and
> >how to give each tgz file a unique name, like the date.

tar -l will stay on a single filesystem though I don't think that will
help if the symlinks are on a single filesystem.  

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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