On 04.02.2015 2:44, Adam Goryachev wrote:
>
> My personal preference is to backup *everything*. Anything less than
> this, and you will eventually have the situation where the weird config
> file wasn't stored in the standard place, and you can't restore it, or
> someone wrote a custom script and saved it to /usr/bin instead of
> /usr/local/bin etc.... The size of the OS files is generally relatively
> small, compress well, and change rarely, therefore minimal cost to
> backup those files, even over a remote/slow connection.
>
> Regards,
> Adam
>

I am agree with Adam in general. Also as a bonus you can track changes in base system with BackupPC history.
But you don't want to backup the ports tree, I guess.

Additionally, I always store big volumes of data on separate file system and after significant changes in OS I make dumps of all file systems where OS resides. In case of disk failure bare metal restore from dump is fast and requires almost no efforts.

For FreeBSD hosts I usually exclude that directories:

$Conf{BackupFilesExclude} = {
   '*' => [
     '/cdrom',
     '/dev',
     '/media',
     '/mnt',
     '/proc',
     '/tmp',
     '/usr/obj',
     '/usr/ports',
     '/usr/src',
     '/var/db/portsnap',
     '/var/tmp'
   ]
};

--
Alexander

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