So by default, most services install their configuration files to /etc/<application>. On my physical systems, I'm using LVM for volume management, and specifically so I can rollback snapshots when I hose things up.I've got a lot of custom applications installed from source that allow me to setup where their configurations are installed to and read from, but they're generally pretty willy-nilly by default - they read from $HOME, or a specific directory in their source tree, and sometimes /etc/<application>.I was working towards fixing these so that I have them all running with configurations stored in a standard location - this could mean creating /etc/<app> myself and keeping them stored in that location (though I'm not sure if that's a bad practice for apps running from src), and it occurred to me that it would be pretty awesome if I could keep them in a subdirectory of /etc stored on a completely separate partition/logical volume, then if (for whatever reason) I need to rebuild a server, I can blow away /root keep the configuration partition, and just remount it in place, then point the services at the existing configuration files.I did some quick digging around and found /etc/local, which appears to be made for this purpose, but I found several docs saying that I shouldn't be using that myself. That directory doesn't appear to exist on my Ubuntu 14.04 server.Moving these to a separate partition/configuration folder would also allow me to back them up easily (I could just point rsync at the root and backup everything with a single command)/cron job).Besides my source installed applications, I was thinking about trying to move my DNS/DHCP/iptables/nginx/apache configurations there as well - i.e. applications that have extensive configurations and need to be backed up, and if I rebuilt the server for whatever reason, I would want those configurations to be retained.Edit: After looking around a little bit more, it looks like /usr/local/etc would be a good location and shouldn't cause any issues having it on a separate partition.Any recommendations on this?
Moving Application Configurations to Separate Partition
linux;partition;backup