On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 03:39:31PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Sat, 2007-12-29 at 15:13 +0000, Chris G wrote:
The whole point of /var according to the standards is that there is *nothing* there that needs backing up.
Ok in the interests of me learning something new. Please point me to the standard that says that you don't need to back up /var.
Reading http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEVARHIERARCHY harder suggests to me that FHS is almost trying to avoid saying anything about backups.
However the first line of the /var section there says:-
/var contains variable data files. This includes spool directories and files, administrative and logging data, and transient and temporary files.
Now in my books "transient and temporary files" are definitely not candidates for backup. "administrative and logging data", it depends, you might want to back them up on a commercial system for auditing reasons but on a personal system it's debateable. "spool directories and files", more likely you want to back them up I suppose.
However *none* of it is what I would call "important data" like the contents of databases, web pages, things like that. The database files and web pages should be in /srv.