dbackup (was: Re: Beta-testing and the glibc 2.1 (Was: Missing ldd? Have libc6 on hold? Get ldso from slink...)

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

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 <dhs@firefly.com>
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