Manolis Kiagias <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
