What to backup

[Charles Swiger]

On Sep 15, 2004, at 2:19 PM, Curtis Vaughan wrote:
> I have a question about what exactly I should backup on my 5.3 FreeBSD 
> Server. So far I have chosen the following directories for full 
> backup.  But perhaps some is overkill.

The best answer is "backup everything".  If you use a decent backup 
system which support differential or incremental backups, you will 
generate one large backup image (ie, a level-0 dump), and then future 
backups will take up a lot less space.

If backing everything up requires too much space, backing up /etc, 
/home, and probably /var/mail is about the minimum one can do, but that 
depends on whether you have other stuff around that you care about.  If 
you keep the output of "pkg_info" handy, you won't really need to 
backup /usr/local or /usr/ports; /usr/src, /boot, and /root can 
generally be recovered from a clean reinstall.

-- 
-Chuck