On Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:39:26 +0000, 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

As I said, I don't need to back up /var because I moved the stuff that
defaults to /var that I've explicitly set up (PostgreSQL database, Apache
website) into dedicated logins in /home and changed the PostgreSQL and
Apache configurations  accordingly. Copies of those configuration files
are are in my main login directory, which is, of course, in /home and so
automatically backed up along with everything else in it.

I've never made changes in /opt, so I don't need to back it up: a
reinstall will fix it.

Similarly I haven't made any changes to the grub configuration, so don't
need to back it up because the Fedora 'install over the net with dnf'
will restore that automatically.



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

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