UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

Long question and possibly a very short answer....

At work we've just got a new 3rd party backup solution (Netvault by Bakbone -it's v. nice), and I'm currently setting up my UNIX clients as part of the backup schedule. It's just occurred to me that there may be certain files or directories that, as a default, can be excluded from the aforementioned backup schedule.

Is there an equivalent directory to the Windows Temporary Internet Files that I can exclude? - I don't want to waste time backing up the peoples latest cricket scores, surfing habits, personal mails etc. or anything that's not business related.

If you've any ideas let me know, but I've got a feeling that I'll need to go through each server individually before I can start making assumptions....

Thanks, as always.

Regards,

Ger

/tmp, /usr/tmp, /home/*/.mozilla All user mail, or just business-related mail? If you want to skip all per-user mail, skipping over /home/*/Mail could do it. If this machine is configured with individual users and individual home directories, that is. You can also ignore per-user config files, /home/*/.* except for ones you decide are important. And if mozilla's running on your server be sure to chop out /home/*/.mozilla, browser cache is kept there.

But none of that works if people aren't running things in their home directories on the server. It really depends how the machine is configured.

Thanks Corona,

The user mail is popped to the end users desktops which are backed up elsewhere, and the mail server is backed up under it's own schedule, so we should be covered for any restores of (or from) business mail.

Any other thoughts?

Cheers,

Ger

If mail's backed up on it's own schedule, you can leave /var/spool/mail from your backups, in fact, maybye leave /var/spool entirely. It's where stuff like mail and printing queues go.

Great stuff - thanks for your thoughts.

Ger