On Wed, Mar 17, 1999 at 01:10:44PM -0800, David Bristel wrote: > This is a good point, and it actually leads to an interesting idea > for a package that would take care of this issue. Now, this is NOT > an easy project, but, what about a package that has a list of the > config files for ALL the packages, and would back up what is needed > to restore a system to normal from a clean install? To have just > the shadow, passwd, and the confs for all the different packages, we > could back up just these files. Then, reinstall from scratch, ignore > configurations, because the restore of the config files would handle > it all. Some would say that this should be handled manually, but it > would make it nice, and it's something that no other distribution has > considered doing. Having to manually back up "key files" is a major > nuisance.
'dbackup' did something similar to but better than this. unfortunately it got orphaned and eventually droppped form the dist. i have a copy still installed and can run dpkg-repack on it if anyone wants to play with it. IIRC, at the moment it outputs a list of filenames which can be fed into cpio or afio or tar etc - this is quite useful. # dpkg -s dbackup Package: dbackup Status: install ok installed Priority: extra Section: admin Maintainer: David H. Silber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Version: 0.1-alpha.2 Recommends: tar | cpio Description: Debian GNU/Linux Data Backup Program. Backup will copy all files that are not part of a Debian package or which have been modified since installation to some backup media. . Actually, at this point it is only true that dbackup produces a list of files which fit the above qualifications. It is up to the user to feed this list to some program (such as tar or cpio) for the actual backup. . I still need to provide user documentation such as a manual page, an info page, examples of use, etc. . I plan to provide a nifty-spiffy administration tool to make the final product easier to use, but this is not yet ready. if nobody else is interested, i may adopt this package myself. i think it's a shame that it vanished from debian. but i probably don't have time. btw, simply backing up a system's conffiles can be done by feeding the output of 'cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.conffiles' into tar/cpio/afio etc. craig -- craig sanders
