How to find disk slice layout

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 10:38:41AM -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> > Note you do not back up the swap partition which is normally 'b'
> > and don't do anything to the 'c' partition which is there only to
> > describe the slice to the system and is not a true partition.
> > You can probably skip backing up your /tmp also.
> 
>  What about /dev and /var?

I'd backup /var, because it's usually small. And it also contains
important things like your port options, and the database of installed
packages.  

Don't bother with /dev though, because devices are dynamically created
when they become available.

>  I also feel that I should have put /usr/ports/distfiles on another file 
>  system, since I don't particularly care to back up those either.  I guess I 
>  could just put in a symbolic link to something on /var

It depends on how you back up things, but both dump(8) BSD tar(1) can
obey the 'nodump' flag.

So if you do 'chflags nodump /usr/ports/distfiles', dump will skip that
directory (unless you're doing a level 0 dump, in which case you'll need
the '-h 0' option). BSD tar will skip files and directories flagged with
nodump if you give it the --nodump option.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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