On 1/29/2012 7:59 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
James Knott said the following on 01/29/2012 07:41 AM:
Anton Aylward wrote:
Make sure you back up/etc/lvm/*
*sigh* Sometimes I miss floppy disks for taking snapshots of just one or two config files like that*sigh*
USB flash drives are cheap and can hold a lot of things. Another trick I've used is to simply email them to myself and leave them on the server. One problem with floppies is they're not reliable in the long term and often short term. Blank CDs or DVDs are another option.
Knowing that intellectually is one thing ...
What did floppies cost? About less than $1. Remember the early Star Trek episodes where Spock had a stack of data cards that looked very like 3.5" floppies.
I know, intellectually, that a spindle of 50 CDs costs maybe $5 ... $10 at the outside. DVD perhaps a bit more, but even at one tenth the cost of a floppy it seems odd to put less than 1M of data on something that can hold nearly 1G.
I've never understood why those dinky credit-card sized CDs are so expensive!
But at least you can write on CDs. USB drives seem to be about $1/G these days. I've got lots of trade-show hand-outs at less than 1G but I'm going to have to white-ex them and write a number then have a card index to tell me which one is which.
One config per floppy made so much sense ...
____ ___ ____ _ _ __/\__/ ___|_ _/ ___| | | |_/\__ \ /\___ \| | | _| |_| \ / /_ _\ ___) | | |_| | _ /_ _\ \/ |____/___\____|_| |_| \/
Take the whole /etc dir per usb stick, write only the name of the machine on the stick, not even the date since you will be routinely updating. Use rsync, just for simplicity, there is no speed advantage to rsync other than over a slow network link. Any configuration that is machine-specific and not trivial to create from scratch again that isn't in /etc, _should be_. _Fix that_. This is why. Any large binary/data/log files that are anywhere in or under /etc, _should not be_. _Fix that._ This is why. Not counting personal desktop configs in /home. That's a whole other issue and from a sysadmin standpoint is considered just user data like any other data such as the application db files or the contents of htdocs, not "host config". You would be backing up /home and other stuff some other way already. You should be able to copy or update the entire /etc in seconds and it should include anything you might ever need and it's anywhere from 10M to 100M uncompressed, 1.5M to at least under 50M compressed if space was an issue on a small thumb drive or if you want to keep multiple machines on one drive. It's essentially the same effort as copying a single file to a floppy, in terms of time and in terms of physical actions. But you get the entire /etc which is both more useful and easier than thinking about which might be the really critical files some day if this or that happens. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org