[Novices] Backing up Linux

[Steve Vaught]

Hello all,

Up till now, my Fedora Core 3 system has been pretty
experimental, in the sense that I really didn't know
what I wanted out of my system, so I installed the
standard tools and apps and tweaked and tweaked till
everything worked.  Now that I've got things how I
like them, it's time to start backing things up, just
in case the worst should happen.  

So, I have two questions.  First, what should I back
up?  I know all my settings are in /home/steve and all
my config files are in /etc...any others I need to
know about?  (simply copying the entire hard drive,
though probably ideal, is not an option right now)

Second, is there any way to export a list of all the
RPM's I have installed to a file so that I can do a
one-shot reinstall of all of them at a later time? 
I'm thinking something along the lines of 'yum list
installed > file1.txt' followed by 'yum install
file1.txt'.
(The RPM man page mentions '--initdb' and
'--rebuilddb' options, but I haven't found any info on
what they do or whether they would do what I need.)

Thanks all,
Steve V.


My PGP public key can be found at: http://www.geocities.com/yvh11a/pubkey.html

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