How to backup the users

[Ivan "Rambius" Ivanov]

On Jan 27, 2008 6:58 PM, Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> 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.
I do not have any databases servers on the machine. In fact, it hosts
only a cvs repository and a web server and I have already backed them
up. I was only unsure how to proceed with the users backup.

Regards
Rambius

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