tom arnall wrote:
On Sunday 20 January 2008 17:49, Marty wrote:tom arnall wrote: > besides my home directory, what else should i think about backing up? I would back up etc as well.
Come to think of it, I might also grab var, and maybe run dpkg-query and save the output, to make reinstallion easier.
> what would be the advantage of 'rsync'? It makes perfect copies of directory trees.is there a problem with 'cp -R' in this respect? (it is how i do my regular backups. not good ;o( ? )
You probably want "cp -a", but that's not quite as good. It doesn't preserve all metadata (including, most annoyingly for me, directory access times).
I usually do something like this: rsync -avxHD /etc/ /mnt/<backup-device>/backup/etc/