[NCLUG] Tidbit: /var/log logrotation by date

[Sean Reifschneider]

On 10/30/2012 11:22 AM, Bob Proulx wrote:
> In theory you could recover a system from backup without recovering

My philosophy is to back up everything and then exclude what I don't want.
I know other people who exclude everything and then include what they think
needs to be backed up, but that seems like a bad idea to me.  Of course,
you DO have to exclude /proc.

Just a tangent.

> I now always add this to my /etc/logrotate.conf file:
>   dateext

FYI: That seems to be the default on RHEL 6 based systems.

One other thing to consider for backups using rsync, they will typically do
a full new copy of a file that changes just a little, like log files.  In
the past we had some systems with big files like 2GB Zope databases, that
were appended to a little bit every day, and every copy would use 2GB.

So for our current backup system it uses "rsync --inplace" which will not
make a full new copy.  We make a snapshot after the rsync, so we aren't
getting hit nearly as hard for big files that grow.

Sean