Linux monkeys - your usual backups...

[Daz]

What do you put in them? At the moment, for my home systems, I just backup /etc /usr /boot and /home. Cant think of anything else I'd really need access to in a recovery situation, possibly /var for logs and any www/ftp root that might be there, though you'd think the latter would exist somewhere else anyway.

[Garp]

Hmm.. /usr /etc, /boot and /home then any other quirks of whatever distro I'm using, basically. Its about all we backup at work too, apart from logs that are also backed up to a couple of locations 'just in case'. I keep a copy of my .bash_profile up on my webspace now, and every time I log on to a system I've not used before, grab it down into my home directory. Its nothing fancy, just a PS1 string, which turns it Green whilst leaving the command prompt its usual colour (good for spotting the command line if you're scrolling back in PuTTy), and tacks in user, host and time. The former to make sure I know who I am, the second to make it clear which box I'm working on and the latter to make it clear in tickets at what time I performed the task.

[Daz]

Yeah that's not a bad tip actually. I already keep some various config files tucked away on my webspace, but never even considered bash.

[Garp]

My .bash_profile:

PS1="\[\033[1;32m\][\t \u@\h \w]\\$\[\033[0m\] "

lives:
http://www.paulgraydon.co.uk/nixbits/.bash_profile

So whenever I'm on a box I just have to wget it.