Smart backups for Gentoo?

[blk_jack]

Are there any lists out there that tell a person *every* file/directory that's critical for the Gentoo distribution? What I mean is if I keep backups of these "critical" files and have to format, I can just do a base install, copy over my "critical" files, do an emerge -e world and have my system recompile previously installed packages and be more or less up to par with my previously lost setup.

Key files to back up would be configuration files in users' home directories, and /etc, but I'm not entirely sure which files in /usr/ and /var/ would be absolute necessary and marked as "critical" for an easy restore.

I think this type of thing would be extremely useful for anybody who does regular backups on their system but doesn't want to back up every single compiled application and is willing to spend the time recompiling from scratch if need be.

[adaptr]

Several things:

- you can - and should - of course do incremental backups instead fo full backups as often as possible, since that simply negates the "problem" you describe.
For industrial-strength Linux backups look at amanda.

- There is a Stage 4 guide somewhere on the forums - search for it, and see if you can use (part of) it.

- Other than that, all you need to get back to where you were is the contents of /etc (don't bother sorting through it, it's 10MB at max) and your world file.

But that is hardly optimal, since you would have to do all the builds from scratch.

Incremental backups.
Look into it, use 'em
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>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

[blk_jack]

I do use 'em, I'm a big fan of rdiff-backup and I've been using it for years now. The issue I have with entire system-wide backups is that it's difficult to back things up on DVD (which is what I'm trying to do) and as such I want to save as much space as possible and get rid of all the stuff I wouldn't need to do a full system recovery.

Thanks for the links though, I'll check 'em out