I think I would rather decide for myself what I need to back up, and what I want to back up.
The idea of someone else, or some program telling me what I need to back up just does not appeal to me.
Besides that, there are plenty of good back up tools available all ready, for example 'rsync'
and the -v option can be used to see for sure that the files you need to back up are getting correctly backed up:
from
Code: Select all
man rsync
----snip---
-v, --verbose
This option increases the amount of information you are given
during the transfer. By default, rsync works silently. A single
-v will give you information about what files are being
transferred and a brief summary at the end. Two -v options will
give you information on what files are being skipped and
slightly more information at the end. More than two -v options
should only be used if you are debugging rsync.
In a modern rsync, the -v option is equivalent to the setting of
groups of --info and --debug options. You can choose to use
these newer options in addition to, or in place of using
--verbose, as any fine-grained settings override the implied
settings of -v. Both --info and --debug have a way to ask for
help that tells you exactly what flags are set for each increase
in verbosity.
and yes you can also tell rsync which files to skip, etc, if so desired.
Any way, thanks for the idea, I don't think any one ever thought of this before
For those that are not sure what they should or need to backup, there are some lists available,
checklist of things to back up before they do a fresh install of Debian
One, for example, is for upgrading,;
from:
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ ... ata-backup
4.1.1. Back up any data or configuration information
Before upgrading your system, it is strongly recommended that you make a full backup, or at least back up any data or configuration information you can't afford to lose. The upgrade tools and process are quite reliable, but a hardware failure in the middle of an upgrade could result in a severely damaged system.
The main things you'll want to back up are the contents of /etc, /var/lib/dpkg, /var/lib/apt/extended_states and the output of dpkg --get-selections "*" (the quotes are important). If you use aptitude to manage packages on your system, you will also want to back up /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates.
The upgrade process itself does not modify anything in the /home directory. However, some applications (e.g. parts of the Mozilla suite, and the GNOME and KDE desktop environments) are known to overwrite existing user settings with new defaults when a new version of the application is first started by a user. As a precaution, you may want to make a backup of the hidden files and directories (“dotfiles”) in users' home directories. This backup may help to restore or recreate the old settings. You may also want to inform users about this.
Any package installation operation must be run with superuser privileges, so either log in as root or use su or sudo to gain the necessary access rights.
The upgrade has a few preconditions; you should check them before actually executing the upgrade.
Some one did ask here:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/question ... to-back-up
There are some good answers,
At the start:
As this question has many different answers, the following list should combine the suggestions into one comprehensive list:
Under most circumstances you want to backup these:
and at the end,
You have to decide yourself on these:
/var/local/ you normally know if you stored something here and whether you want it on a backup or not.
/var/opt/ see /var/local/ or better check if something important is stored here.
/var/log/ depends on whether your logs are important to you and if you have enough space to store them (they might take a lot of backup space over time).
To sum it up, I would never use some tool that tries to decide for me , what I need to back up and what I don't need,
