You can probably skip /var/run
, but that directory holds so little data, it's probably not worth skipping.
Sure, you can back up to /var/backup
(or whatever location you wish, really). Just be careful exclude your /var/backup
from your backup sets otherwise you'll get into a recursive backup situation, which isn't good.
Additionally, I assume that /var/backup
is on local disk? If so, make sure to consider how you'll get the contents of /var/backup
off of local disk to a remote location somehow. Needless to say, those backups won't do you a bit of good on local disk if you have a hard drive failure or filesystem corruption.