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Message: [QUOTE="Martin Gregorie, post: 3018275"] No, its good for any system, desktop, server or whatever. The benefit is that by doing this you don't modify /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc, so after a reinstall that's one less file to remember to edit your favorite customizations into. Take a look at /etc/profile. Right at the end you can see the loop that finds and executes all files in /etc/profile.d Changes made to /etc/bashrc and /etc/profile are global: per-user customizations should be put in .bashrc and .bash_profile (and possibly ..bash_logout) in the $HOME directory of the user they affect. Sounds like a decent solution in that case. I didn't find that. I was using Amanda until my tape deck died. A quick comparison of the price of DDS4 drives and USB external disks convinced me that there had to be a better backup medium than tape. :-) "man rsync" tells all. You might have to experiment with it a bit to get it working exactly how you want because its options are many and various. BTW, if you're thinking of making compressed backups, both tar and zip are good. The problem is media related. Most USB drives are preformatted as a single FAT-32 partition. This works out of the box BUT a FAT-32 limit is that no individual file may exceed 4GB and a complete system backup may well break that limit, leaving you with a corrupt and useless backup. The solution is simple: just reformat the USB drive as an ext2 or ext3 partition. Ext2 & ext3 can both store files as large as the free space on the disk. Sure, I can see why you'd not want to fiddle with the production system. However, once you've recovered from a dead disk or done a fresh install from a new distro version you'll see the benefit of keeping /home in a separate partition. The symlink tricks just increase the benefit. Making copies of customized files outside /etc is IMO essential. Its well worth spending time going through /etc looking for files with dates after the date&time when you did the install. Take a look at the find utility - its designed for this type of search. Doing the same for /var is only necessary if you're running named (the DNS domain files are in /var/named) or Apache (the root Web pages are in /var/www). The other common partitioning trick is to put /var (and maybe /tmp) in their own partitions. Both can grow unpredictably and putting them in separate partitions limits that growth and prevents, say runaway writes to /tmp, from having too much impact on the system. [/QUOTE]

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