Once upon a time John Hasler said... > Cameron Hutchison writes: > > Hard disk crash. I've gone through the same pain as the original poster. > > So you mean restore, not reinstall.
Well, both. I restored my system by reinstalling it. > Any package that overwrites your changes to config files and/or uses > debconf as a registry is seriously buggy. For some packages, I will maintain its configuration through debconf, since I have no desire to understand another config file syntax and debconf is used well by the package to generate a config file given some basic information. If I am to change some of that basic information, it needs to be in debconf. Therefore I need to be able to reload the debconf database from a backup. That is, it is not enough just to restore /etc. That will get the system back up and running with the same configuration at that point in time, but future reconfiguration through debconf will not work. > > How can you backup your debconf answers and restore them in such a way > > that it replaces re-entering the answers? > > Back up /var/cache/debconf While I accept that this is the correct answer, surely this is the wrong place to put this sort of data? According to the filesystem hierarchy standard (FHS) at http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/fhs/fhs-5.2.html , it says: /var/cache is intended for cached data from applications. Such data is locally generated as a result of time-consuming I/O or calculation. The application must be able to regenerate or restore the data. Unlike /var/spool, the cached files can be deleted without data loss. The data should remain valid between invocations of the application and rebooting the system. I dont see how the debconf application can regenerate or restore this data should it be deleted. More distressing for me is that I dont include /var/cache in my backups. According to FHS, I should not have to. Thanks for your answers, John. CHeers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]