On Mon, 24 Nov 1997 19:02:13 -0800, Garth Gillespie <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>I am backing up my listserv machine's hard drive pretty regularly and I was
>wondering about the procedure should I have a hard drive failure.  When I
>upgraded from 1.8b to 1.8c I did a GET on my list and then PUT it back
>after the upgrade, but I am not doing GETs every night, so in the case of a
>disaster what is the procedure for restoring a list?  Just restore the
>whole listserv directory?  Recompile and re-install and then restore
>certain files?  Which files?
>
>Naturally I hope this never happens, but just in case, I don't want to lose
>my 20,000+ subscriber base.

Excellent.  Most people think about regular backups only *after* a problem
occurs.  8-)

If you are backing up the entire hard disk, there isn't too much you need
to do, depending on how often you do it.  LISTSERV's binary program files
do not change over time unless you upgrade the version, so recompiling
should not be necessary (are you under unix or ???) but the SITE.CFG or
go.user file may, and of course the archives change daily.  the msg queue
files change by the minute so unless you are mirroring, it's more trouble
to recover than just start over and ask people to resend their msgs.

Do not bother to restore index files, delete them and LISTSERV will rebuild
them, both for WWW interface (if applicable) and regular archive subject
search.  Depending on the state of the system at time of crash, you will
have a few error bounces but they will be minor.

If you can specify your OS we can be a little more specific.  Do a full
backup weekly or monthly, try to do an incremental backup daily, so your
archives and digests, etc are reasonably current.

--
 __________________________________________________________________
 Ben Parker ..... L-Soft international Inc. ..... [log in to unmask]