On 12/12/06, linux <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
tar I knew about... the rest no... Yes this is what I was pretty much looking for... other than my $HOME, what are the important bits to backup? Thanks, Ed Matt Morgan wrote: > On 12/6/06, linux <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I finially have my FC6 installation the way i like it.... I am sure at >> some point in the future, I am going to mess it up though. In Windows >> there is the System Restore capability. How can I achieve the same >> effect under FC6. That is, roll back changes that did not work out the >> way I assumed etc. Basically, undoing dumb stuff. >> >> The best way would be 'Don't do dumb stuff" but being rather new to >> linux, the fact that what I am about to do is dumb, does not occur to me >> until after I am through doing it.... > > You don't really need a "system restore" in linux; settings are all > stored in files you can back up. There's no registry or anything like > that. Since you're new to linux, let me direct you to > > dd > tar > pax > star > > which are all ways to create backups easily. Might not really be what > you're looking for, or maybe you already know about them, but I'm > pointing them out just in case. >
FYI, this list prefers bottom-posting (add new comments to the bottom) so that it's easier to track a conversation through from start to finish. $HOME is all I back up. What else is important depends to a large degree on how you've set up the computer and how much work you want to do to restore it in the event of difficulty. For my desktop at home, I set up yum for updates following the advice in fedorafaq.org, and I use (almost) exclusively software that's available from the package repositories via yum. I have a couple scripts I wrote myself (for backup :-)) that are in /usr/local/bin, but they don't change much so I just put copies in $HOME and back those up. This means that when I restore the computer, I'd have to reinstall FC, and then do yum installs to add packages that don't come in the install, and yum updates to bring everything up to speed. You can run rpm or yum commands to keep lists of all the packages you have installed, but I don't mostly bother, since installing via yum is easy enough that if I'm missing a package, I just install it when I need it. This means that I would lose some configuration settings for things like cron and anacron, which are all in /etc, as far as I know; and I have a short startup script in /etc/rc.local that I have to keep a copy of, and I would have to recreate users (but there are only two). Altogether it's easier than worrying about how to backup everything, basically, and since it's likely that I'll upgrade to a new release before my disk crashes, and I'll want all new packages at that point anyway ... it covers it for me. For a server, even a small home server, with a lot of services and specialized configuration, you'd definitely want to back up /etc. I think that most well-behaved packages will put all or almost all of their config into /etc, but there's no guarantee if you've installed something manually (whether from source or some binary installer). That stuff could be anywhere (another good reason to install from repositories). On my home server, I set up a software RAID. So I'm protected from disk crash, but not really backed up. That's more or less OK, because we save our files locally, on our desktops, and only copy backups to the server (for this I use unison, which is probably another great tool for you to check out). good luck, Matt
