Hi there, for a while now I have been thinking about how to backup/restore a system efficienly (i.e. without having to dump *everything*, including binaires, into the backup). The idea that comes to mind is to somehow backup the package system's metadata and restore it to the destination. Then, 'aptitude install' or alike should do the trick.
Now this issue has been raised on debian-user again, and I definitely want to get to the bottom of this. To what we made it over there was something along the lines of # BACKUP dpkg --get-selections | awk '$2 == "install"' > packagesNG_installed aptitude -F '%p' search '~i~M' > packagesNG_autoinstalled debconf-get-selections | grep -Ev '^[[:space:]]*(#|$)' > packagesNG_debconf # RESTORE aptitude update aptitude upgrade dpkg --clear-selections dpkg --set-selections < packagesNG_installed debconf-set-selections < packagesNG_debconf xargs -r -- aptitude markauto < packagesNG_autoinstalled aptitude install # maybe use -q -f -y ? Now I haven't come to experiment on this a lot (I am currently mirroring the needed packages to be able to do this efficiently). Before I start, I thought asking here might help. So: any thoughts? ;-) Regards, Mark _______________________________________________ Aptitude-devel mailing list Aptitude-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/aptitude-devel
