[ale] Today's lesson: rdiff-backup restores

[DJ-Pfulio]

>> What stuff do you backup when the backups aren't "everything" to ensure
>> a restore?  I save about 4G off every OS backup by being selective.
>> Anyone else doing that?
> 
> These backups were very selective.  One was the web server document root
> and the other was the mysql data directory.  My "backup" of the OS
> amounts to dumping the package selection list so I can reinstall that.
> I also keep a copy of /etc for all the configurations.
> 
> 
> I do the same thing to many other machines.  I just back up whatever
> generated data or configuration files exist and the rest comes from source. 

Sorry for the length here. Started out as 10 lines ...

Nice. Good to see I'm not the only person doing selective backups.
With the stuff I backup, I can recreate the machine. Anything that is different
is either a newer package (usually less than a week different) or something not
important to my stuff.

               What to backup?

Backups include:
* /etc - gotta have that and is is TINY!!!!  If you don't backup /etc, you are a
fool, IMHO.
* mdadm-details.md1 mdadm-details.md2
* /home - depends on the system whether there are any users or not.
* /root - this is where I keep daily backups of stuff that isn't in /etc/ in a
/root/backups/ directory. If hardware disappears, I want to have a record of that.
** Files like: blkid.txt   crontab.root  dpkg.list  lvdisplay.txt crontab.jd
df.txt    parted.list    lshw.list  vgdisplay.txt  mariadb.dump.sql
redmine.dump.sql blog.dump.sql  (basically, any DBs)
* /usr/local/ - never remember what I've had to install manually - this is where
that goes.

* assorted areas on different machines ...
** /var/backups/ - on some machines. Don't recall why, looks like APT DBs and
passwd/group files.
** /var/lib/plexmediaserver - on the Plex Server - don't want to loose the media
library.
** /var/www. /var/log/nginx, websites and logs (if I'm hacked, I'd like to have
lots and lots of logs to figure out what happened.)
** /Data/Quicken12 , /Data/IRS ---- places that would suck if missing. Plus I
don't trust Windows backups. ;)

               How Many Days?

Thanks to rdiff-backup, keeping 30, 60, 90, 120 days usually isn't a big deal.
How long to keep is dependent on the risk factors and amount of data involved.
Email front end gets 120 days, but since the information needed to rebuild it is
tiny, this isn't any hardship.

/Backups# rdiff-backup --list-increment-sizes postal
        Time                       Size        Cumulative size
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sat Feb 20 01:10:08 2016         17.8 MB           17.8 MB   (current mirror)
....
Tue Nov 24 01:10:05 2015       279 bytes           17.9 MB
Mon Nov 23 01:10:07 2015       279 bytes           17.9 MB

Yes, that's 18MB for 90 days of backups.  Why wouldn't not have lots of backup
versions? Heck, perhaps I need to make it 240 days? Changed. That was easy. The
real email server - well, that is much larger.

Desktops tend to have the most crap - 50G for a chromebook, 12G for an Eee.
200MB for a virtual machine Host,

                Got DR?

32K     DR-Plan.html

Do you have one of these written up explaining how to restore all the different
systems so a friend or coworker can help if you are killed driving to work
today?  Be certain to spell out any encryption stuff in a way that requires
physical access.  Perhaps an envelope left in a safety deposit box with a 10
keys for the next 10 years?

                Death

Some of my family members have started using KeePass and place the login for
that somewhere inside their house that is known only to the executor(s) along
with a USB flash drive.  That way, they can have anything they want inside their
KeePass database, encrypted.
http://blog.jdpfu.com/2011/03/25/101-uses-for-a-password-manager

Anyway, sorry for the length.