system restore from a cron backup

[Kevin Kempter]

Hi All;

I've setup a cron backup script to backup my Fedora 10 laptop - mostly in case 
a new yum update breaks my system.


I'm currently excluding /proc but when the rsync script hits the /sys 
directory I get lots of read errors like this:

sys/module/vmmon/initstate                                                           
rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/initstate": No data available 
(61)     
sys/module/vmmon/refcnt                                                              
rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/refcnt": No data available (61)        
sys/module/vmmon/srcversion                                                          
rsync: read errors mapping "/sys/module/vmmon/srcversion": No data available 
(61)    

Questions:

- should I exclude /sys from my rsync backup ?
- Is it safe to restore my system without restoring /proc and /sys ?
- If I do need to restore can I simply do an rsync like this:
  rsync -va /backup-location /system-location 
(i.e. rsync -va /stage/backup/etc  /etc)

Will rsync overwrite the files say in /etc with the backed up files even if the 
current /etc files are newer than the backed up files.



Here's my backup script if it helps:
# cat run_rsync.sh
#!/bin/bash

for I in `cat dirlist`
do
        echo "[$I]"
        echo "=========="
        rsync -av /${I} /stage/backup
done


and here's the dirlist file:
# cat dirlist
bin
boot
dev
docs
download
etc
home
lib
lib64
lost+found
media
mnt
opt
root
sbin
selinux
srv
sys
tmp
usr
var



as always,  thanks in advance...



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