On Sat, 2007-12-29 at 10:39 +0000, Chris G wrote:
Yes, but that *shouldn't* be necessary. The whole point of /var according to the standards is that there is *nothing* there that needs backing up. If something needs backing up it should be in /home or /srv (the 'right' place for web pages etc. is actually /srv).
Erm no
Var is variable data (hence the name) there is nothing to suggest that the data there is worthless (logs at least might be very handy when recovering a failed system), just that it changes a lot.
The whole point of var was twofold, 1. to make it possible to mount other dir's such as /usr read only and 2. by containing the busiest areas of the filesystem (in terms of writes) it is possible to contain the damage an unclean shutdown may cause and minimise the amount of time it will take to get the system back online.
In the days of fsck operations that could take several hours this was very relevant because you could fsck var (which really needs to be RW for things to work) Then bring the system back online with most other stuff RO and then check the other filesystems whilst providing some degree of availability.