Can you please tell me from your experience what directories/files should be backed up? What are you using for this job?

Added: I know maybe I wasn't clear about it, sorry but I wanted simple answer as this this this is good to back up and this not. And I use cpio or cron etc. Answer what slacker_et give me is perfect! Thanks for your time and effort appreciate it!

Basic backup: /home, /etc maybe /root and /boot and often you want to backup some parts of /var such as /var/log.

I can use cp and scp for simplest backup. tar, cpio for tape etc... I can use dump and restore for whole file system backup. rsync for incremental backup.

I wrote this in case someone goes through it. He can learn as well
If you have further suggestions just post it plz. I want to hear it!

Thx!

That's like asking "how high is up"?

What you need to back up, depends on where YOU decided to put your data. No one knows that but you. There are lots of backup products out there, that all do different things. Since you don't say what you need to back up, onto what media, your level of skill, or give details, it's hard for anyone to say what's the best thing for you to use.

Mondoarchive, mkcdrec, and systemimage are good 'all-around' backup options. So is tar, cpio, and just the 'cp' command, depending on what you're doing.

Quite true. It depends on what you consider useful to be backed up. I use a rsync script. It's in my sig if you wanna have a look.

Really, I think up is as high as high is up, and that when backing up your system, a complete, all-files backup is the way to go. This means if you mess up any particular part of your system, than you have a backup. Personally, I think a Live CD and a determined user can fix just about any mess if you are careful to not rm -rf anything important.

Anyways, if you're worried, theres nothing more secure or safe than a full system backup. Nitpicking files and folders may do more harm than good if you don't make backups often. I would also say that simply backing up the whole system might be easier than any alternatives.

I think dd'ing the partition to a external drive is a good method.

I agree with the whole-system backup methodology, and with it in general. But, I think alot of it depends on the user.

A newbie, or a person who just saves all their data files in their home directory, can easily get away with just backing that up, or copying stuff off to another drive/location. For someone like that, going through "dd", or even mondoarchive (which is menu driven), is going to be a stretch. If it's made too hard, novices WON'T do it, and lose data.

Me, I use mondoarchive for 'full' backups, and take incremental snapshots of my data, on a daily basis, to multiple USB thumbdrives. Fulls go to external HDD's and DVD's both. But that's overkill if you just have someone who needs to save their pictures, music, and word docs, on occasion.....

is there a proggrame for linux for making a backup files as general that works fine even with the linux files it self( as there is in windows) as i want to save my files (i do alot of research's and that includes with linux files sort of and im afraid if i lost that anyway)

Sorry, can't understand what you're asking. "Works fine even with the Linux files"????

There have been several backup options mentioned in this thread already...mkcdrec, mondoarchive, systemimager, dd, tar, cpio. Lots of others have been gone through on this site before, too, that you can find with a quick search.

On my home systems/servers that run all the time. I backup everything that is a local filesystem.
And I use rsync to copy to a spare hard drive on my one desktop that acts as an NFS server for all my other machines.
So on my Slackware 12.1 systems I backup:

• bin
• boot
• etc
• dev
• home
• lib
• opt
• root
• sbin
• srv
• usr
• var

and exclude:

• lost+found
• media
• mnt
• proc
• sys

When I make a major change to a system; such as when I upgrade. I usually boot the system from the installation cd/dvd.
And then use the dd command to copy the entire system to a spare hard drive.
--ET