On Thu, 14 Jan 2021 06:36:06 +1300, Richard Falken wrote:

> Re: Re: My darn NAS...
>   By: The Natural Philosopher to Chris Green on Thu Jan 14 2021 11:06 am
>
>  > depends on what you want. I rsync huge amounts of data. Disk space is
>  > cheap. Recovering from data loss is not, Working out what is
>  > important and what is not is even more expensive.
>  >
>  >
> I agree with this position.
>
> I know that just backing up the data that is not easily reproductible
> suffices,
> in theory. However, if you only back the data up without the
> applications and the OS stack, your recovery consits on a sysadmin
> installing software for a week and swearing at his notebook.

Theres a simple tweak that fixes most of that stuff: move /usr/local to
/home local and replace it with a symlink to /home/local

I've done the the equivalent with my (large) PostgreSQL databases and my
local Apache- based website (by default these are in /var, so I changed
their configurations to put these files in /home too.

Everything continues to work as before but now I've secured almost all of
my own work and customisation by backing up /home

The only thing thats not safeguarded now is the contents of /etc, so
either back that up along with /home or keep copies of everything in /etc
that you've explicitly changed in, say, your normal home login. I do the
latter but of course ymmv. Changes in /etc made by software updates don't
need backing up because they'll be automatically reapplied when you're
rebuilding the failed device that holds your filing system.


--
--
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

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