Re: Backups and the distribution

[Rob Mahurin <robm@mad.scientist.com>]

On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:59:08PM -0700, Alex Swavely wrote:
> What file(s) would I need to backup to get a complete snapshot of all
> installed packages from the distribution I'm using in order to be able to
> recover a system to it's previous state?

My nightly backup includes

/home
/root
/etc
/usr/local
/usr/src/linux/.config
the output of dpkg --get-selections (unedited)

Last year I had a SIMM fail and didn't diagnose it for a while; I got
some corruption on my /var and /home paritions and decided to do a
full reinstall.  I didn't re-format my /usr/local partition, so I
didn't need that backup.  When I got to the "install packages" part of
the install, after the reboot, I exited dselect without doing anything
and said

# dpkg --set-selections < /mnt/backup/dpkg.selections
# apt-get dselect-upgrade

As I needed to configure things, I copied their information from my
/etc backup and voila! things were as before.  All in all, it was
quite a smooth recovery.

Rob

-- 
You will inherit some money or a small piece of land.