Re: Finding files to back up

["nate" <debian-user@aphroland.org>]

Mark Carroll said:
> Being of the belief that a fresh reinstall can help to spring-clean my
> machine, my usual approach to backups is to preserve my package
> selections and the files that I've added (e.g. in /home/) and modified
> (e.g. in /etc/) that wouldn't be recovered in a simple package
> reinstallation.
>
> I see that dpkg can tell me about associations between files and
> packages. Can I somehow get a list of the md5sums of the package
> maintainers' version of the files so I can tell if they were modified?
> Maybe things aren't as simple as I'm imagining?


I think debsums is what you want(its a package). though last I heard
not every debian package came with md5sums on the files, so it may
not be 100%.

"Description: Verify installed package files against MD5 checksums.
 debsums can verify the integrity of installed package files against
 MD5 checksums installed by the package, or generated from a .deb
 archive.
"

nate