<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/30/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Daniel Burrows</b> <<a href="mailto:dburrows@debian.org">dburrows@debian.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 07:09:06AM +0200, MNO <<a href="mailto:manostienen@gmail.com">manostienen@gmail.com</a>> was heard to say:<br>> I really hope that aptitude will have it as an option in it's menu to export
<br>> and import the selections.<br>><br>> At least i now learned how to do this with dpkg which is very helpful right<br>> now.<br>><br>> for the config files i'll just save all .conf, .ini etc.<br>
<br> Saving and loading the selection list might be useful, and I think it<br>would be doable without too much trouble.</blockquote><div><br>That would be a great feature to have. And i really hope to see it one day.<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> What i try to do is following:<br>><br>> Export the selections for a pre configured machines, like this:
<br>> - HP Vectra 420 Office,<br>> - Compaq iPaq internet kiosk<br>> - HP EVO File server<br><br> OK, so you're talking about systemwide restores. I was a little<br>worried you wanted to restore user configuration files (~/.*), which
<br>is quite a bit trickier (unless, again, you blindly back up and<br>restore everything).</blockquote><div><br>Yes, well i hope to take it as far as possible. Keeping in mind that an average user (with basic knowledge) should be able to restore. And i dont want to bloat valueble diskspace with backups of system files, files that are always 100% the same as the original installed ones. And with a fresh install then you also get the newest updates where needed. So only need to backup the /home dir and that one sits on the file server for all the users.
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> If you really are recreating /etc entirely, I would recommend taking<br>a serious look at just making a tarfile of everything in there, then
<br>blowing it away after a reinstall and unpacking the archive.</blockquote><div><br>No , i try to avoid this if possible. <br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
> I'm helping someone who is running a low budget Internet cafe in Africa.<br>> Harddrive failure is one of the most common issues, and backups are the<br>> second issue.<br>><br>> So if i can store at least the selections on a web server and have an easy
<br>> way to apply them to a fresh install then i'm half way ready.<br><br> It sounds like you probably don't have much disk space for this -- but<br>if you do, you might want to look at partimage. AIUI it's designed for
<br>this sort of thing (and will save bandwidth on restores).</blockquote><div><br>True, disk space actually is "risk" space over there, most systems are running on (very) old hard drives and if one crashes then it gets replaced by another piece of junk.
<br> </div>Mano.<br></div>