How to backup the users

[Bill Moran]

Manolis Kiagias <sonicy at otenet.gr> wrote:
> 
> Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I am running a small FreeBSD server and I have a a couple of users
> >> ssh'ing to it. I want to wipe the server out and reinstall FreeBSD on
> >> it, but I want to preserve the users' credentials. Can you please
> >> advise me how to back them up?
> >
> > /home/*
> > /etc/master.passwd
> > /var/cron/tabs/*
> > /var/mail/*
> >
> > possibly other files.
> >
> >
> > but format+reinstall is when you have windows, with unix there is no 
> > need to.
> >
> >
> You might as well save the whole /etc, you will probably need other conf 
> files and surely you would like to have /etc/passwd and /etc/group
> In fact, I would also backup the whole /usr/local/etc to get all the 
> configuration settings for my services and so on.

A good, general rule of thumb for backing up a system is:
/etc
/usr/local/etc
/home
/var

/var is the wildcard here ... /etc and /usr/local/etc are generally very
small.  /home can be huge, but if it is, it's probably because there is
a lot of important data there.

But /var can be large with a lot of stuff that you may not want to back
up.  Do you need /var/log, for example?

Frankly, if you have enough space to back up, I recommend you back up the
entire system and restore selectively.  Do you have, for example, a
database in /usr/local/pgsql?  If you're asking this question, you're
probably better off safe than sorry.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com