[HCoop-Discuss] package like "debbackup"?

[Aaron Hsu]

On 2007-06-19 13:04:26 -0500, Adam Megacz <megacz at hcoop.net> said:

> 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>".
> 
> Bonus points for being able to emit a list of such files so I can nag
> admins who have modified files in places where we weren't expecting
> them to be modified (like /usr).  In theory it wouldn't hurt us to
> just back up everything, but I would sort of like to know where and
> how our systems differ from a vanilla debian install so I can try to
> minimize those aspects.

Might I suggest that a few simple scripts ought to be able to do this? 
Essentially, apt-file should provide all the information one needs to 
create a program like this.

1. Generate a list of files on the filesystem.
2. Generate a list of files that belong to packages.
3. Compare the two and remove files from 2 that belong to 1.
4. Backup three using a date based backup system.

This could all be done pretty easily in scripts. I don't know if I'll 
have time to create the scripts, but if someone wanted me to give it a 
go, I might be willing to tinker with it while others were at it as 
well. Basically, I think our setup is simple enough that we don't need 
to do anything complex here.
-- 
Aaron Hsu <aaron.hsu at sacrificumdeo.net>

"No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he 
could do only a little." - Edmund Burke