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seb
Asked: 2011-03-01 12:45:23 +0800 CST

What is safe to exclude for a full system backup?

  • 772

I'm looking for a list which paths/files are safe to exclude for a full system/home backup.

Considering that I have a list of installed packages.

  • /home/*/.thumbnails
  • /home/*/.cache
  • /home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/Cache
  • /home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/OfflineCache
  • /home/*/.local/share/Trash

  • /home/*/.gvfs/

  • /tmp/

  • /var/tmp/
  • not real folders but can cause severe problems when 'restoring'
    • /dev
    • /proc
    • /sys

What about...

  • /var/ in general?
  • /var/backups/ - can get quite large
  • /var/log/ - does not require much space and can help for later comparison
  • /lost+found/
backup

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    When I rsync my system to a backup partition, I exclude these:

    --exclude=/dev/* \
--exclude=/home/*/.gvfs \
--exclude=/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache \
--exclude=/home/*/.cache/chromium \
--exclude=/home/*/.thumbnails \
--exclude=/media/* \
--exclude=/mnt/* \
--exclude=/proc/* \
--exclude=/sys/* \
--exclude=/tmp/* \
--exclude=/home/*/.local/share/Trash \
--exclude=/etc/fstab \
--exclude=/var/run/* \
--exclude=/var/lock/* \
--exclude=/lib/modules/*/volatile/.mounted \
--exclude=/var/cache/apt/archives/* \

    This way I am able to boot into the backup partition the same way I can boot to the original one.

    So to sum up, I would suggest

    • not excluding /{dev,proc,media,...} themselves, just their contents

    • excluding /var/{run,lock}, and especially the big /var/cache/apt/archives/

    • 40

  2. I'll recomend to exclude all /usr (except fort /usr/local/) and have a backup of dpkg --get-selections

    In my opinion a Full backup isn't really usefull. I rather prefer backup data and preferences and then restore packages from the official repositories.

    But is my preference...

    /usr contains mainly static binary content from distribution packages. Reinstalling a package will restore /usr contents. Also /bin and /sbin contains binaries from distribution packages.

    /usr/local contains manually installed packages (out of distribuition packages). so this is worth to backup.

    • 6

  3. I also read all of the answers and all the other related questions when I was configuring my full system backup.

    My 2 cents would be not to exclude anything but only when you are doing a full system backup of an offline system.

    Let me elaborate now: If you backing up the system from within itself, then you may exclude some directories as others have mentioned but this is not a good way in my opinion as it can introduce some bugs later on when restoring the system. For example, if you exclude /tmp directory, then after restoring it, /tmp won't be there and system will create one and this can have stuck login screens due to chmod & chown issues on /tmp. Also not backing up ~/.cache directory can result in breaking up database cache of Ubuntu Software Centre.

    What I do is use a live CD and use LuckyBackup and backup the entire system without omitting anything. Now when restoring, I chose 'delete files not present in the source'. This way you will have an entire system snapshot restored exactly to the state when you created the backup (kinda like snapshotting a VM).

    • 2