On Sat, 2014-07-12 at 09:50 +0200, Heinz Diehl wrote: Restoring /proc (if such a thing is even possible) would pretty much guarantee screwing up your system. Recall that each running process has a subdirectory in /proc under its PID, which is going to be different when the system runs again and may indeed overwrite data from a completely different process. Definitely not something you want to do with a restore. poc

On 07/11/2014 03:33 PM, Joe Zeff issued this missive: I use this sort of thing to back up to a directory named after the machine and the date located on a USB hard drive mounted at /run/media/Rick/USBDrive/backups: rsync -avXA --exclude-from=/etc/skipdirs.rsync / /run/media/Rick/USBDrive/backups/`hostname`-`date +%d-%m-%Y-%T` and where the contents of /etc/skipdirs.rsync is: /proc/* /sys/* /dev/* /media/* /run/media/* **/.cache/google-chrome/*** **/.ccache/*** /proc, /sys and /dev are dynamically created at boot so backing them up is sort of a bad idea (well, backing them up is OK but restoring them would be bad). I don't back up /run/media or /media simply because I don't want to back up removable media--especially anything I'm backing up TO (circular references anyone?) I also don't back up various caches (and it's shocking how much of that cruft there is). If you want, you can back up /srv. RHEL-related systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) generally don't use it. Some distros use it for the webroot, e.g. /srv/www or or other "sharable" or "servable" content. It's not a dynamically created filesystem like /proc or /sys or /dev. Your choice. For what it's worth, I have also used MondoRescue and Clonezilla with success if you need to restore to bare metal after a total meltdown. Just a suggestion. Your mileage may vary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer, AllDigital ricks(a)alldigital.com - - AIM/Skype: therps2 ICQ: 22643734 Yahoo: origrps2 - - - - If you can't beat your computer at chess...try kickboxing! - ----------------------------------------------------------------------