Paul E Condon wrote at 2009-03-27 16:35 -0600: > On 2009-03-27_13:53:14, green wrote: > > I think I have minimally tested these commands, but it has been a while. It > > would be great if someone could try this out and add a wiki page for it. > > Well, I'm going to try it out, I can't promise a wiki that anyone would care to > look at. We'll see how it goes... Sounds acceptable. :) > > Of course, it would likely help to restore a /etc/apt backup before doing any > > of the restore commands. Obviously a different sources.list would cause > > problems. > > In my idea of a good backup, I take a complete copy of all of /etc, so I already > am getting all of /etc/apt, as well as my exim4 configs, and all the other stuff > for which it is easy to forget the details under the pressure of a disaster > recovery situation. So /etc/apt seemed a natural place to put the selections, but > Andrei has another good idea. I use /var/local/backups because I backup /var; to each his own of course. Without some of the obviously unnecessary (and large) portions (found with ncdu), mine is about 0.4G. > > Lastly, I don't think it is possible to restore the package set perfectly if > > much time has passed between the backup and the restore, because of changes in > > package versions; the more time passes, the more the package set will have to > > change for a restore. This is why I have added the backup command that saves > > the versions for all installed packages. The only way to get around this is to > > have a backup of debs for ALL installed packages. > > I think you are too demanding. Your standards of automation are too > high. When I think of an automatic restore, I think of it being a > situation where my system was distroyed or corrupted while I was away > from home. The time lapse from the last time the system was working > properly (and the last backup was made) until I try to restore is a > few hours to a few months. In the case of a few months, I might not > want an exact restore because there might have been security fixes > released that I would want to include in the new system. Well, I have just tried to think of all the possible problems. In the time I have used Debian, I don't recall ever having needed to do a reinstall (hence the 'minimally tested'). Every install has been a new one for a system on which Debian has not yet been run. Of course this could be applied to that even also I suppose...
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature