Re: backup all the changes I made to the "virgin debian system"

[brian@debian.org (Brian Mays)]

Dan Jacobson <jidanni@deadspam.com> wrote:

> Well, it's been a month of me editing various files turning my virgin
> woody system into one that actually works :-) , and now boy do I
> regret not keeping a captain's log of at least the names of the files
> I changed.  I was thinking that there would be some automatic way to
> detect this --- and you guys are going to tell me how please.

You should have asked this before you began changing all of these
files.

> Goal: to backup just the changes I made to the "virgin debian system."
> Sure hope my backup file will be slim and trim.  I will make a bzip2ed
> cpio, just tell me the filenames.  I will have 2 CD-R's and alternate
> appending these cpio.bz2's to them every few weeks and keeping them in
> separate places in the house.

Try using RCS to track your modified config files.  This has the
advantage that you will also have a record of all of the changes that
you have made.  See rcsintro(1) for more information (in the rcs
package).

The process goes as follows:

1) Install a package (or packages)

2) Check in the file that you want to edit with

   ci -m"Original Debian version" -l config_file

3) Edit the file (e.g., "vi config_file")

4) Check in the revised version with

   ci -l config_file

Thus, you have a copy of the original file and a copy of your changes.
If you are consistent in tracking your changes with RCS, you can go back
later and recover your config files from any moment in time.  Finally,
if you would like to back up your changes to configuration files, simply
archive all of the files under /etc that end in ",v", since they will be
the RCS files containing the entire history of the config files that you
have modified.

More complicated scenarios are possible, such as using branches to track
changes to the Debian version of the config file and merging these
changes back into your modified version of the file.  I leave these as
an exercise to the reader.  Read the RCS documentation to learn how to
do this.

- Brian


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