The Natural Philosopher  wrote:
> On 14/01/2021 13:24, Martin Gregorie wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> >
> what about /var  that contains all the webs servers and Mysql databases
> by default? /opt as well has stuff in it. /boot has grub configs
>
I used to back up /var but I don't have any Mysql databases now,
partly for this reason, and anyway backing up a database file while
the server is running isn't a very good idea.  The web server stuff I
have symbolically linked to my home directory so it's backed up that
way.

I have nothing in /opt, I've checked, if I did I would add it to my
backups.  I *do* back up /usr/local.  /boot configs are generated
automatically at installation in general, I've not manually changed
them.

--
Chris Green
·

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