What's important to backup ?

dsmith2besure · Feb 12, 2009

The content's of my mac book pro looks like so. Is everything important ? I mean i'm figuring out a backup procedure at the mo with rsync and want to know what to exclude if anything.

.DS_Store
.Spotlight-V100
.SymAVQSFile
.Trashes
.com.apple.timemachine.supported
.fseventsd
.hotfiles.btree
.vol
Applications
Desktop DB
Desktop DF
Developer
Library
Network
System
User Guides And Information -> /Library/Documentation/User Guides and Information.localized
Users
Volumes
bin
cores
dev
etc -> private/etc
home
mach_kernel
mach_kernel.ctfsys
net
opt
private
sbin
tmp -> private/tmp
usr
var -> private/var

any advice as to what i really need to back up and what I could exclude?

answers on a postcard

thanks

cwa107 · Feb 12, 2009

It depends on what your disaster recovery goals are. If your hard drive were to fail, would you need to make your entire system immediately available? If so, then use a program like Time Machine or SuperDuper to do a full backup of everything. If it's just that you'd like to safeguard your Documents/Data/Music, etc, then you can just backup your home folder (/Users/<your username).

What's important to backup ?

dsmith2besure

cwa107

Shop Amazon