[conspire] How do I determine what I need to keep from my internal hard drive and what is the recommend way to move things to an external hard drive

[Darlene Wallach]

Rick,

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 8:06 AM, Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:
> Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):
>
>> So how do I determine what to save off/keep/backup/image from my
>> internal hard drive? And what is the recommended way to save the stuff
>> off?
>
> You're not going to want to hear this, but:  The time to think about
> where the parts of your system reside that merit backup is long before
> you find yourself in urgent need to back things up.
>
> That having been said, have a look at 'Backup Scheme' on
> http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Admin , for the approximate regimen I use for
> the linuxmafia.com server.  Of course, it includes subtrees that almost
> certainly don't exist on your non-server box, but you can ignore those.

The 'Backup Scheme' is *very* helpful - Thank you!

>
> 'Copying Directory Trees' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Admin is useful
> for figuring out how to copy files, and a general recommendation of
>
>  rsync -avx olddirectory newdirectory

Thank you - I'm using the rsync command with the 'z' option too.

>
> is probably all you need.
>
>> I already moved all the data files onto my external hard drive.
>
> Well, the first link cited includes an emphasis on making sure you've
> snagged _all_ the data files, including the trees you might forget, like
> /root, /var/mail AKA /var/spool/mail, and /usr/local (but it's indeed
> possibly you've used nothing but /home for locally generated data
> files).

Yes - I had only moved some of the data files under my home directory.

So now I'm using rsync to copy directories.

>
> The other stuff you need are:
>
> 1.  A reference snapshot of the current contents of /etc.

I did both the tar and rsync

> 2.  Snapshot of your partition layout.
I used "parted -l" since I used parted to create the partitions. I
like the naming scheme of including the date.

> 3.  Listing of your installed package names.

Did that with "yum list installed"

>
> The 'Backup Scheme' page gives a Debian-centric approach to those
> problems, but you can adapt it to other systems.
>
>

I'm using rsync -avxz to copy:
bin
etc
home
lib
opt
root
sbin
sys
usr
var

Just in case.

Now my question is:
What is the recommend way to get a snapshot of my installed Fedora,
which currently is Fedora-10? My reason for the question is I
attempted to install Fedora 11 a while back but the temporary user
login was not generated and I could not login so I went back and
reinstalled Fedora 10. In the future if an install fails, I'd like to
be able to get back to my previously installed system. Would I use
genisoimage? Then if I needed to I could use that .iso copy it back
onto my internal hard drive and get my system back?

Thank you

Darlene Wallach
-- 
equal justice under law