stephane magnier

Hi There,

Who can tell me what should I save, in order to get back my config ?

- I would need to keep my Network conf, Samba configuration (as minimum)

- do you know if there is a possibility to reinstall RedHat (actually v 8.0)
without erasing all applicaitons and Datas ? (I just wish to rinstall a new
redhat without automatically reformatting the harddiskl !:-(
- do you think that if I save the folder /etc/, I can easily take my
original conf ?

Regards,

Stephane

trog woolley

While stranded on the hard shoulder of the information super highway stephane.magnier@libertysurf.fr typed:


Short answer: backup everything as often as possible and to as little
media as possible; a backup on one tape is better than a backup on two.

Long answer: a backup strategy is only as good as the time you are
prepared to put in designing and testing it, and even then the moment
you come to perform disaster recovery, you won't be able to read some
of the backup media. I know I've done DR for real several times.

You should firstly sort your disks out so that system related stuff
is in separate filesystems to application stuff. Users data should
be in it's own filesystem too. A typical scenario is :-
/home - users private data lives here
/data1, /data2, ... - application data (eg oracle, sybase) lives here
/opt, /oracle, /applic - the application lives here (including the oracle engine)
/usr/local - your own system software lives here

yes this does represent a system much larger than your setup, but
the principal is the same.

As for backups, backup the application and users data everyday,
or preferably more often. Oracle re-do logs for example, should
be backed up hourly in a large environment.
Backup the application, when changes are made to it.
Backup your own system software when changes are made to it.
Backup the system data, when a configuration change is made.
A "configuration change" represents many things, adding or
deleting users and printers is one, another is upgrades to
the operating system.

In your situation, I would identify where all the configuration
files for samba and other things that you run live, and write
a script to squirrel these off to a directory probably in
the /usr/local filesystem, and back that up. Thus if you ever
have to do a virgin install (eg your disk goes belly up),
you simply install Redhat, creating the filesystems (partitions)
as you go. Once RH is running, restore /usr/local, /home, etc
and copy your configuration files back. All being well, your
system is magically back as it was.

--
Trog Woolley | trog at trog hyphen oz dot demon dot co dot uk
(A Croweater back residing in Pommie Land with Linux)
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