Topic: backups

[mark]

Does anyone have experience with what the backup feature available throught the server-manager actually backs up?
I have been looking around but have been unable to find some detailed info on what exactly it backs up. Mostly I want to make sure it backs up the non-standard software that I have installed/setup. I am sure that it must do all of the i-bays and user accts/mail, but if it doesn't do anything else than I need to replan my backup strategy.

a little more detail:
I have an rpm to do dynamic dns and some packages like the system monitor and awstats installed. Also the gallery php picture album software installed in /opt. Truthfully the packages would be fairly easy to reinstall but I don't want to lose the picture gallery images&setup  and some other data in if I ever need to restore. So if it doesn't get touched I'll need to change to a backup plan that does everything

Thanks for any help/info
-mark

[Dan Brown]

The tape backup backs up everything, but doesn't restore everything.  The backup to desktop backs up the following information:

* MySQL tables
* The following files/directories:
        'home/e-smith',
        'etc/e-smith/templates-custom',
        'etc/e-smith/templates-user-custom',
        'etc/ssh',
        'root/.ssh',
        'etc/passwd',
        'etc/shadow',
        'etc/group',
        'etc/gshadow',
        'etc/smbpasswd',

[mark]

Thanks for the info Dan,
Looks like I'll have to do my backups manually some other way if I want to backup everything. I have a spare drive of the same type so I was thinking I might just do a dd of one drive to the spare, maybe setup a cron job to do it automatically once or twice a week. In case of a failure it would make recovery pretty easy too.

thanks again
-mark

[Boris]

I just tried using dd. It takes hours to copy.
System info:
Celeron 1.2Gh, 512 RAM, 2x40Gb ATA100 hard disks.
If you go this way, your may consider do it overnight.

[mark]

yeah, I know the dd will probably take some time to finish but after I thought for a couple of minutes about what I really wanted to accomplish I figure I will only need to do the dd once. Then I'll switch over to using 'rsync' via a cron job and the backups should be quite a bit quicker! (right now I've only got about 2-3Gb to copy so it should be only moderately painful)

-mark

[Dan Brown]

Instead of dd, you might just try cp -a.  Or, if your concern is drive failure, just set up a software RAID 1 array.  There's also some discussion on the devinfo list at the moment regarding methods of automatic disaster recovery, which I'm interested in for the same reason.