Hello everyone,

After a fresh (re)install of Lenny, I installed all cca. 800 previously 
installed packages (from a list file, via "xargs aptitude install") and then 
restored /etc from my rdiff-backup archive (containing just /etc, /home and 
lists of installed packages). It worked fine, but I ended up with some 
directories having the wrong owners (e.g. logcheck files being owned by hal, 
ntp lock directory owned by gdm), which broke some things. I guess the 
automatically generated uids during the new installation were different from 
the ones in my backed up passwd/group files.

What would be the best way to restore the full system in such a case?  Here's a 
list of possibilities I thought of, but I'm open to new ones:
- restore /etc before installing the packages (but then I'll get asked a lot 
during installation about what to do with the existing configuration files)
- first install etckeeper, then install all packages, then restore /etc from 
backups and then try to analyze and fix what might be broken using source 
control diffs
- install packages, restore everything in /etc except passwd, shadow and group

BTW, can anyone suggest a better backup approach? I normally follow testing, 
where new versions of packages appear often, so I would like to avoid backing 
up everything (/usr eats up too much space with incremental backups). Backing 
up /etc, /home and some files in /var would be ideal, since I can get the rest 
by installing, but how can I best restore the full system in such a case?

Thanks in advance,
Laurentiu

P.S. Please cc me when replying, I'm not subscribed to debian-user (too high 
volume).






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