backup systems. (Use Amanda!!)

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

John Abreau <jabr at abreau.net> writes:

> 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. 

Right...  One could ALMOST base this on whether the RPM Database has
been modified (although one would need a flag for whether an
RPM-installed file has been modified, but that's relatively rare).

> 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. 

Right..

> 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. 

The problem is that sometimes I _do_ modify rpm-installed binaries
(for one reason or another).  So I don't want to just out-right
exclude /bin, /sbin, /usr, or /lib.

As for backing up all of /etc -- I don't want to do that..  For
example, there is no reason to backup /etc/services, and if I
re-install I probably want to newly-installed /etc/services instead of
my backed-up version!

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available