backup with tar: Which dirs

Roland Smith rsmith at xs4all.nl
Tue May 3 08:53:46 PDT 2005


On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 09:32:10AM +0200, v.demartino2 at virgilio.it wrote:
> I have a large usb harddisk with a 60GB freebsd slice that I want to use
> to backup the FreeBSD 5.4 installation on my laptop once in a while.
> I think that tar is the right tool for this purpuse.

You could also use dump, combined with bzip2. If you want to use tar,
use gtar with the  --one-file-system option.

> Now I ask:
> What directories do *** NOT *** require to be backed up?
> I know this is the case of /tmp 
> but what about /dev? and /var?

The /dev/ directory is filled automagically. You don't have to back it
up. I would make a backup of /var, since things like your ports database
and mail queue reside there.

In short; back up /, /usr and /var, and /home if you have that on a
seperate slice.

Roland
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