If it's a VPS to which you have full access, it's good idea to backup /etc
, /home
, /var
, /usr/local
directories, and anything else that you had to change by hand. Other directories, like /usr
are handled by the system's package manager and you don't need to have backups for them - when you will configure new machines, system will install all neccessary files for you.
*.so
files are shared libraries, they are created at compilation time, and unless you changed the sources, you don't need to backup them. PHP configuration can be found in /etc/php?/*
directories and files (on Debian, on Red Hat it should be in a similar place).
As for MySQL, it's good to make a text dump of the database using mysqldump
- it will be easier for you to restore the databases in different MySQL instance which may by a different version, incompatible with files from the data/
directory.
Apache configuration should be kept within /etc
directory, or within virtual hosts directories, which you should also backup.