Re: quick and dirty backup

[Marc Auslander <marcausl@gmail.com>]

Bonno Bloksma <b.bloksma@tio.nl> writes:

> Hi,
>
> My Debian machines have almost no data, just packages and config files. Just before a major upgrade, and a few othe times, I'd like to have a quick and dirty backup of most files including logfiles, run files like dhcp.leases etc. So what I do is a simple:
>        tar -zcf /mnt/backup/linXXX-lenny.tar.gz / --exclude /mnt --exclude /proc --exclude /sys
> A while ago I noticed I needed to add the /sys directory to that exclusion.
>
> Is there anything else I need to exclude? Using Lenny with kernel 2.6.26-2-686 it seems my backup is running "forever" but maybe I'm just impatient. ;-)
> I am going to upgrade this system to Squeeze later today so the kernel will probably end up being 2.6.32-5-686 at the end of the day.
>
> Bonno
>

What I do is to tar just the root filesystem, not the stuff mounted on
top of it.  You can either use --one-file-system option, or bind mount
root someplace else and to the tar there.  I just tar everything,
since it's not really that big.

I have restored and booted root's saved this way and it works.