What are all files should be taken backup in a linux server
 

Hi All,

Can anybody please tell me What are the necessary files should be taken backup in Linux server?

For example, If I hosted a site in a linux server(Application server) and It has Oracle database.

Instead of taking backup in Oracle, What others should be taken backup in tht server.

Please help me! I am new to linux


Thanks,

Karthi

Well backup needs are very varied and almost always a matter of personal choice. People backup things they deem necessary. But if you want to generalize, you can start with
/etc, /boot. You can also include /home and /var if the available space on the backup media permits or you feel you need to backup those two directories as well. Again this is a very generalized list, audit your system to find out what is important to you and back that up.

It is a lot easier to decide what to exclude than what to include.

Typically on our systems we do an "OS" backup that excludes any application or database filesystems/directories we've created. We ALSO do backup those application and database filesystems/directories separately. It is somewhat easier to reload an OS than to recreate missing data from a database so it is actually more critical to get those DB backups than the OS backup.

Note that backing up Oracle Databases while they are running (unless you're using RMAN to do it) doesn't really work. It will backup but you'll find you can't "recover" the database after you've "restored" it from the backup medium. Typically we will shutdown the DB before the backup then restart it after the backup.

The deal is that Oracle and applications do put "some" files in "system" directories like /etc but the bulk of what they do should be in the database/application directories. There is no reason to try to exclude these tiny things they do in "system" directories when backing up the "OS".

You should backup any files that are important to you, but each person will have a different idea as to what is "important" and what is not. My view is that the most critical files are data files that you've created. As jlightner pointed out, if your server crashed, it's relatively straightforward to resinstall the operating system and various applications (eg, Oracle). However, if your users' data is lost, there is no way to recover it unless you have good backups. I don't think it's possible to provide you with a detailed list of which files you need to backup (after all, we can't see what's on your system) but clearly you would want to save the Oracle database files (this includes the physical files that contain the tablespaces, also the archive logs, etc) plus any user data.

Note that Oracle has its own utilities for backing up the data -- those files should be backed up regularly (ie, daily) and moved off site. At the risk of telling you what you already know, here's a very brief cheat sheet for running Oracle in archive log mode.