backup systems. (Use Amanda!!)

[jabr at abreau.net (John Abreau)]

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Derek Martin <blu at sophic.org> writes:

> Additionally, simply parsing  the output of rpm -V doesn't really
> work; you'd have to get fancier than that.  rpm -V only prints out
> files that are in the RPM database which have been modified, and hence
> should be backed up.  But what about files that are NOT in the RPM
> database?  For example, no package owns /etc/hosts, and no package
> owns /etc/resolv.conf.  But these are files that you probably will
> want to back up.  But you don't want to back up all of /etc, because
> many of those files ARE owned by a package, and may well not have been
> modified.

First, you don't have to run the rpm -V every time you backup. It would 
presumably be enough to run it once a month. 

Second, the idea is to use rpm -V to generate an exclusion list. In other 
words, what you back up is the union of two sets: 

    1. Almost everything that's *not* in the rpm database, and 
    2. Everything in the rpm database that's been modified. 

By "almost everything" I mean to exclude the obvious stuff, like /dev, 
/proc, anything nfs-mounted, and so on. 

On the other hand, simply excluding /bin, /usr, /lib, /dev, /proc, and 
whatnot, is certainly easier. When you exclude /usr, though, you'd want 
to make sure to re-include /usr/local. 


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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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