I'm currently running Debian 5 on Linode, and my aim is to be able to back this up and restore to a Debian 5 install on a different provider (currently prgmr.com) for disaster recovery purposes.

I'm backing up the following to Amazon S3:

/bin
/etc
/home
/lib
/opt
/root
/sbin
/srv
/usr
/var

Is this enough to restore back to a host, after installing a base Debian 5 platform? I've ignored more hardware/kernel specific stuff. Is this a correct decision?

Basically, can I restore these directories to a base Debian 5 install at prgmr and it having up and running?

Thanks,
Richard

As long as whatever you compile from source ends up in /usr/local and not the main FS, you should be able to skip /bin, /sbin, /lib, and /usr/ except of /usr/local .
Just make your backup script export the list of installed packages
(dpkg --get-selections , aptitude search '?installed' , something like that) you can install the base OS, then the packages, THEN overwrite the configs and put your data in... I think.

Of course, it still won't be a plug-and-go, there wil be some things, networking settings being the first thing that come to mind, that'll need editing.

_________________
rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

Thanks.

I don't have anything compiled from source, hence copying all the binaries.

Good idea, or bad?

Cheers,
Richard

Bad. You're better off getting a package list and reinstalling