How to backup a farm node?

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Hi,

searching the forum, I have not found any backup procedure for a farm node.
I am running such a node, actually with these module enabled "gctwh", and I am thinking about a backup strategy for the files I host, so I could recover for failures, but I am not sure about which directories are mandatory and if that a simple tar or rsync will work in this case, I am worried about db inconsistencies doing the backup while the node is running, and if this is the case how the backup should be perform to persist a consistent state? is there any dump/restore tool?

thanks,
Fabio