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back-up advice - slightly off topic



This is only slightly off topic because a problem I had just proved again how
much better LINUX is than .......

After a stupid mistake on my part :-( I ended up reinstalling Mandrake 7.0. I
thought it wouldn't be a problem since I'm very **religious** about backing up
on CD-RW, so I didn't think I'd have any problems restoring my settings.

The bad news is that although I had backed up everything, I had very little
idea what files I needed to restore to get each program, desktop setting, etc
to work as they did before. True most of the files are in /etc, /boot (my
customized kernel), /root,  or /home, but it took me a while to figure out what
I needed. 

The good news is that once I found everything, it was really easy to fix the
damage. As opposed to the crazy special format of the REGISTRY on ......, all
the files I needed were plain text and copying them to the right location was
all I had to do.

So my advice is:

1 - back-up
2 - back-up
3 - keep a list of important files and what they do - for instance /etc/fstab,
/etc/lilo.conf, ~/Mail/*, ~/.gnome/*, and others and keep this list on a
different machine or print it on paper in case you need it after a crash. I'm
now preparing a list for my own system and adding to it each time I discover
another file or directory I didn't yet restore. For instance, as I write this I
noticed that my signature file is wrong so I'll look for it and after restoring
it from CD-RW, I'll add the location to my list.
4 - back-up

Hope this will help save someones ass :-) 


----------------------------------
E-Mail: solomon@barak-online.net
Date: 27-Apr-2000
Time: 12:58:46

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