At the end of this next bit of inane rambling is a question. The inane rambling is there to try and put the question into some sort of context.

<inane> By a somewhat circuitous route I've lately been thinking about the best ways to back up and restore my Debian based GNU/Linux system.

It was prompted by a number of things one of which was showing someone at work how easy it was to set up a Debian system using Knoppix.

I must admit even I was a bit impressed by how easy it was to boot from the CD, run the install to HD script, tweak the sources file, and then apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. Took about an hour to do the lot (including re-arranging the partitions of the existing disk so we could dual boot with Windows*). That included installing GRUB as a boot manager.

But it got me thinking about how easy it would be to use Knoppix as a recovery tool if I should need to do a re-install from scratch.

And that got me wondering about how I could get from the Knoppix configuration back to my preferred configuration.

At the moment I just dump of whole chunks of various partitions using some pre-written backup scripts I got from somewhere (probably just Googled around the web and picked them up from there). But I've always thought that it was a bit of a sledgehammer approach and the there must be a more elegant way of doing this.

There is some useful info about back-ups on the Linux documentation Project site (www.tldp.org); Linux Complete Backup and Recovery HOWTO, Ch.8 of Linux Administration Made Easy - Backup and Restore Procedures and Ch.12 of The Linux System Administrator's Guide - Backups.

All together these give some pointers to which bits of the system you need to back up. </inane>

<question> So say I have just done a complete re-install from Knoppix, and also recovered all the important config files into /etc (e.g. fstab, passwrd, XF86Config, etc). Could I then get enough info from the backed up apt config files to feed into apt and have it install any missing packages, remove any unwanted packages and update any out of date packages (and possibly downdate (is there such a word?) anything too recent)? Is this information something I'd need to generate via apt when I do my back-ups? </question>

I you can do this there are some interesting possibilities, like taking regular snapshots of your setup and being able to roll-back to the earlier configurations.

Has any one tried this? I've had a look with Google and can't find anything similar but it's entirely possible that I was using inappropriate search words.

Regards,

Keith

* OK so I used PartitionMagic and not Parted but I couldn't find Parted on the Knoppix disk and we had a PM bootable CD to hand. But I've used Parted before and it worked just as well.