Backup VPS before cancelling account

[Matt Graham]

On 2014-03-25 10:51, keith smith wrote:
> I have a VPS that I no loger want to use, however I would like to
> backup the the config files... ETC
> Can I just tar and compress everything by doing something like:
> tar -czvf vps_name.tgz / Then just sftp or wget to get it to my local 
> drive?

Sort of.  You can't just recursively tar up / though, because the tar 
file you're making will be under / .  And you don't want to tar up /proc 
and /sys because those are virtual filesystems, and you don't want to 
tar up /boot if this is a VPS because /boot is probably VPS-specific.  
Something that'd probably work better would be more like:

mkdir /backup
cd /
tar czf /backup/somefile.tgz bin etc home lib root sbin usr var

...then scp /backup/somefile.tgz to another machine.  Personally, I'd 
only back up /etc , /home , /usr/local , and the stuff in /var that's 
relevant like /var/www , but you can do whatever you'd like.

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