backups

I am new to SUSE and Linux. I am trying to decide what to back up, to another hard disk, to a memory stick or, perhaps the best, to an online service. And, most important, what to back up. How about an incremental** backup of /home, /etc, /opt, /var?**

What do you think? Thank you.

“/home” is the most important. And what is in “/etc” can be useful because that has config settings that you have made.

I usually only backup “/home” and a record of the config changes that I have made. I go by the theory that reinstall is often just as easy as restore from a backup.

Thank you, but what about /opt? It has stuff that wasn’t there with the install but what I added, such as my Brother printer, Comodo antivirus, and there will likely be other things.

It depends a bit on how the products there “behave”. If they have only iinstalled themselves within /opt, the a restore of /opt from backup will make them available again. But if they also spread themselves in other system directoris (like /etc), there could be problems. I know they shouldn’t do that, but you never know with products that go into /opt.

When you keep a good track of what you installed extra after your first installation (and you should do that regardless if things go from elsewhere in /opt, or are “official” from OSS and non-OSS repos and go in the standard directories), you can reinstall them all immedialtly after a reinstall from your list.

Most people will not have very much in /opt. I see that I have only Google Earth in there. I reckon that reinstalling Google Earth after a disaster isn’t to time consuming.

Depends on what the macine is used for.

For a personal desktop I would generally concur with nrickert. Reinstalling the system and applications is no big deal, and not unique to you. I personally also keep a backup of /etc/ssh /etcHOSTNAME, any .local files in /etc and /usr/local. If it is a shared machine then /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow.

However if is is used as a server then /srv, /etc/apache2/vhosts.d, /etc/postfix, /var/lib/named //var/lib/mysql, /var/lib/mailman, etc. need to be considered.