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A few weeks ago, it was Yom Kippur, the time for Jews to reflect on the grievous errors they have made over the previous year. I've been reflecting on the error of not backing up my server. You know how every introduction-to-RAID document warns that RAID is not a substitute for making backups? Well, it's worse than that. Since it's harder to reconstruct data from a striped RAID partition than from a regular partition, data recovery services charge four times as much. So my wife and I have lost several years of archived email and our library database. My blog has been down for about two months because I haven't had time to reconstruct it from the entries on an older server and the search-engine caches. O, I have sinned! Fortunately, when my wife left MIT she took *two* discarded G4s with her, so I do have a server up again, and *this* time, by golly, it's getting backed up. Nothing fancy (since fancy solutions take time to set up and administer and therefore, in practice, don't get done): a cron job uses dump to make incremental backups of the /, /usr, /home, and /var partitions, and then uses unison (which is like rsync) to copy the dump files to my friend's server. The remote backups are not encrypted, because I'm more worried about forgetting whatever password I'd use to encrypt them than I am about my friend snooping into my email archives. However, since the dumped root partition contains /etc/shadow, I am a *little* worried about some third party breaking into my friend's machine, discovering my dump files, and using them to break into mine. And if I ever do need to reconstruct my system from backups, it's not like I need to reconstruct it with exactly the same passwords as before. So my questions for the assembled multitude are: (1) The cron job does not unmount partitions before dumping them. What are the consequences of this? (If the only consequence is "every once in a while some process will be modifying a file on a partition while it's being dumped, and that file will not be backed up or that dump will be aborted", I can live with that.) (2) What files, other than /etc/shadow, should I be flagging as not to be dumped?
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