[Gllug] Terrible weekend

[Alain Williams]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 01:48:24PM +0000, Tethys wrote:
> 
> Alain Williams writes:
> 
> >I do, however, take the occasional snapshot of the RFS & /usr.
> 
> Huh? Whatever for? /usr is the absolute last thing that should need
> backing up. For a start, it should never really change (and IMHO it
> should generally be mounted readonly). Secondly, it's managed by the
> system's package manager, the details of which are usually on /var.

I agree, except that things don't always work like the theory, ie extra things
get installed in the wrong place (ie not /usr/local) & the such.
I do not use /usr to restore OS stuff from (that is what the distro media/...
are for), but for picking the odd few files from. Having said that
I do very rarely need anything from it - but it is cheap to do against
the potential pain of loosing something.

Yes: I do backup /var, but mainly in case I want to look at log files/...
that may live there, again it is easier to backup the whole lot rather
than select /var/log, /var/www, ... & miss something.

> So unless you're backing that up as well, restoring /usr would probably
> be either out of sync with the package manager, or totally unmanaged.
> You'd be better off reinstalling. The OS is essentially disposable
> anyway in most cases (and the FHS compliance of modern distributions
> helps greatly here).


-- 
Alain Williams
Parliament Hill Computers Ltd.
Linux Consultant - Mail systems, Web sites, Networking, Programmer, IT Lecturer.
+44 (0) 787 668 0256  http://www.phcomp.co.uk/

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