Hi All;

I've setup a cron backup script to backup my Fedora 10 laptop - mostly in case a new yum update breaks my system.

I'm currently excluding /proc but when the rsync script hits the /sys directory I get lots of read errors like this:

sys/module/vmmon/initstate

rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/initstate": No data available (61)

sys/module/vmmon/refcnt

rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/refcnt": No data available (61)

sys/module/vmmon/srcversion

rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/srcversion": No data available (61)

Questions:

- should I exclude /sys from my rsync backup ?

- Is it safe to restore my system without restoring /proc and /sys ?

- If I do need to restore can I simply do an rsync like this:

rsync -va /backup-location /system-location

(i.e. rsync -va /stage/backup/etc /etc)

Will rsync overwrite the files say in /etc with the backed up files even if the current /etc files are newer than the backed up files.

Here's my backup script if it helps:

# cat run_rsync.sh

#!/bin/bash

for I in `cat dirlist`

do

echo "[$I]"

echo "=========="

rsync -av /${I} /stage/backup

done

and here's the dirlist file:

# cat dirlist

bin

boot

dev

docs

download

etc

home

lib

lib64

lost+found

media

mnt

opt

root

sbin

selinux

srv

sys

tmp

usr

var

as always, thanks in advance...