[HCoop-Discuss] package like "debbackup"?

[Michael Potter]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 11:04:26AM -0700, Adam Megacz wrote:
> 
> o great and wise Collective Wisdom of The Hcoop,
> 
> Does anybody know of a package similar to "debbackup" which is still
> maintained?  Basically I'm looking for something which will figure out
> which files on a system either did not come from .deb packages or have
> been modified since then.  The idea is to backup everything that would
> *not* be restored by an "apt-get install <all-my-packages-here>".

At my old employer we used a slightly different approach,
cfengine. For a small installation, the setup is perhaps not worth the
trouble, but with more than four or five systems it gets tiring to
duplicate the config everywhere. Cfengine is self-documenting, and it
also is a sort of backup itself. 

Restore operations were theoretically, fresh OS install, run
cfengine. Done. Wait, find the things I forgot to do through cfengine
because I was in a hurry 18 months ago. Dang. Okay, done.

There are other options that do the same thing, like Puppet. 

-- 
Michael Potter
mpotter at hcoop.net