Which directories to backup

The following is a list of directories that you must regularly back up and one that you should never back up. These directories are in no particular order. It includes the user file, the group file, the password file, networking information, most application configurations, startup files, filesystem information, mount points, and other system-wide configuration files.

Without this directory, it will take you a very long time to put the system back to where it was before the outage or failure. For a user, there's no more important directory to back up on a system. Users assume that you'll include their personal files in your daily backups.

You should do so. Trust my experience on this one. It's been said that good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from poor judgment. This is true, and I have stories to prove it. The root user's home directory is an important one to include in a backup.

This directory is where you, the system administrator, keep downloads, configurations, scripts, notes, and other essential information that is often unique and irreplaceable. Yes, I'm OCD. Don't judge me. That's just a personal preference and you not required to do so. A shared directory might belong to a particular group, such as finance or human resources, that has special permissions. Don't create these types of directories until you have a need.

Shared directories are important to include in a backup because users store corporate data in them, and there may be no other copies. NFS-mounted directories should generally be excluded from your backup scheme.

Because these directories are mounted from remote systems. They can be in the same data center, or they could be from a system very far away. For the uninitiated, the previous comments are jokes Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams k 8 8 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Ok thanks for that info. Are there any disk clone backups that support "live" backups?

Backups that don't require me to shutdown or deal physically with the server such as put a CD in. Ashesh: In the end it's up to the person performing the backup to determine which files are truly important to them. Show 3 more comments. Johan Johan 5, 3 3 gold badges 30 30 silver badges 52 52 bronze badges.

Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Which Folders To Include In backup? Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 11 months ago. Active 1 year, 8 months ago.

Viewed 35k times. Improve this question. Jason Jason 1 1 gold badge 3 3 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. Yeah I too want to know what the important files are without having to backup the entire drive.

Crontabs root and user , exportfs etc. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Gabriel Staples 4, 3 3 gold badges 45 45 silver badges 70 70 bronze badges.

It's the home directory of the root user, I keep some sysadmin scripts in there, for backup etc. Is there any need to include the. It can be tens of thousands of files and many gigabytes of data. My understanding is that if we don't include it it just means that applications have to re-generate temporary, cached files again next time they run, which increases run time and startup time but is harmless, right?

Show 1 more comment. Perhaps it's a mount point. Otherwise you can look at each sub-directory and decide for yourself if the data contained is important enough to you to back it up. For example dpkg dumps a list of installed packages here, so you can later know which packages to install after restoring the backup. You probably want to backup this.

Improve this answer. DeveloperACE: Usually not. Normally you want to backup configuration, so you don't have to reconfigure everything when your life data gets lost. Arguably you might not want to backup all the configuration files you never changed and are thus still the original default configurations, but I know of no backup software that makes this distinction easy enough to be worth the effort.

Show 1 more comment. Community Bot 1. So the answer, is: "it depends on what you're running on your machine". Luc Stepniewski Luc Stepniewski 3 3 silver badges 6 6 bronze badges. I really think that this question should end in something like a list of "needed folders" plus "optional" ones, plus your own files.

Note that you can install and use etckeeper available on Debian at least. Mat 48k 10 10 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Quran Quran 21 2 2 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook.