Topic: what to back up?

[dilligaf]

Hi,
wanting to find out what others are doing to ensure clean backups. (no busy files, or compare issues)
It is easy to tell the tape software to just back up the whole server, but I am not wanting to bother with wasting hardware mileage on files that are not needed.
I respect Darrell Mays work, and looked at what he has in the backup2ws 911 job as at Aug 10 2004 and set my Tapeware Backup software to do same with some exception to be noted at the bottom of the post.
On My SME 6.x server I back up:
/home,
/etc/e-smith/templates-custom,
/etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom,
/etc/group,
/etc/gshadow,
/etc/passwd,
/etc/shadow,
/etc/smbpasswd,(can not find this file, DMC 911 job lists it?)
/etc/ssh,
/opt,
/root

**add:
/var/lib/mysql if you use twiggi
/usr/local/psql if you use pervasive SQL

Have also found that it is common to create i-bays for software images etc and these end up getting included in backups, wasting tape and time.
I am trying to come up with a solution to that, such as creating a dir called software-images or something to that effect, and burn them to cd, or backup to a seperate tape or something.