server rebuilds and disaster recovery

[Jonathan Horne]

On Friday 28 April 2006 13:41, Philip Hallstrom wrote:
> > this weekend, im going to have to rebuild my 6.0 server in order to
> > recover from a faulty disk (i have to eliminate a RAID1 array, and break
> > rebuild the RAID5 with one more disk).
> >
> > all my daemons and whatnot, im pretty good at recovering.  sendmail,
> > apache, mysql, etc, shouldnt be a problem.
> >
> > what i think i need help with is, what is the best way to recover my
> > previous system's user accounts?  this time around my server is going to
> > go from piece-by-piece updates, to a full buildworld before i build all
> > the daemons.
> >
> > can someone recommend a good way to recover my users, or dissertate how
> > they go about doing it successfully?  also, any tips outside of users
> > that you think i might benefit from in a rebuild/redeploy, would also be
> > appreciated!
>
> Maybe I'm not fully understanding, but why wouldn't you just backup
> /etc/passwd (and all it's related master and db files), etc/group, heck,
> /etc/ in general, then everyone's home directories, /var/cron/tabs and
> /var/mail (or wherever you store their inbox)
>

well, thats pretty much what im doing right now, i just 
tarball /usr/home, /etc, /usr/local/etc, /root, a few things from /var.  what 
i need to know is, what is the proper way to re-import these files once the 
new system is up?

cheers,
jonathan