Backing up programs

[Francisco Reyes]

With every HD problem I loose less and less data. On my last episode I
lost only the current day's worth of data (backup at night). However I
realised that I also need to backup programs installed on the machine. It
takes a long time to rebuild all packages (I had a list of ports I had
installed).

How do others backup their programs?
I am undecided between trying to backup the entire /usr/local and making
packages of my critical ports and burning that to CDs.

I also took care of all system files, but I realized that backing up all
of /etc wasn't so helpfull if I didn't know which files I used. I also, as
of last crash, am going to backup /usr/src since restoring all of /etc
only makes sense with matching sources.

The one thing I have against trying to backup all of /usr/local is that
something like PostgreSQL may cause the backup problems whereas the
package solution will be a one time deal and will not affect production.

The other thing I learnt that needs to be backed up is the /usr/ports
directory.