[TAG] Backup software/strategies

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben at linuxgazette.net):

> I see your point, and I agree that it can be a valuable approach - in
> fact, it's well worth considering in my own case. The problem is that a
> solution like this can't be generalized to the average user; most people
> have no idea of what on their system has been "custom-modified" vs.
> being tweaked by package installation, and chances are good that they've
> also forgotten anything unusual that they have tweaked. 

My own is experience is that there turned out to be only a few
"surprise" locations -- the Mailman tree under /var/lib, MySQL's
database files under /var/lib, and the CGIs under /usr/lib -- that only
gradually occurred to me over about a week of occasionally pondering the
problem and wandering the directory tree, looking around.

It helped that I always carefully leave "system" directories to distro
control, with the exception of /etc, system CGIs, and Mailman
configuration, and carefully make sure locally installed software went
under /usr/local and not in the regular system tree.