<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.8.1"> </HEAD> <BODY> Having grown tired of hand-recovering from a system damaged by a combination of my cluelessness and some software's arrogance at adjusting things at random (I'm looking at whichever package constantly modifies my menu.lst for GRUB here....), I found an amazingly simple way to keep track of changes to my configuration files, boot files, etc. that is simpler and faster than using tar, et al to make backups. There is a one-time preparation step you need to perform to use this: <BLOCKQUOTE> <TT>$ sudo apt-get install darcs</TT> </BLOCKQUOTE> After that run the following commands twice: once in /etc, once in /boot. (You can probably find other places where this would help too, but these are the two directories that matter most to me right now.) <BLOCKQUOTE> <TT>$ sudo darcs init</TT> <TT>$ sudo darcs add -r *</TT> <TT>$ sudo darcs record -am "Initial check-in."</TT> </BLOCKQUOTE> You now have a version-controlled repository of your /etc and /boot directories. If you make any changes to these directories, or if you have changes made from under you, you'd type: <BLOCKQUOTE> <TT>$ sudo darcs add -r *</TT> <TT>$ sudo darcs record -am "<insert explanation of change>"</TT> </BLOCKQUOTE> This updates the version control repository with your changes (and with any new files). Then, if at any point you have to recover an earlier configuration, you can type the various darcs commands (for this I'll leave you to the man page or the manual found at <A HREF="http://www.darcs.net">http://www.darcs.net</A>) used for recovering old versions. Be aware here that darcs will occupy additional space (duh!), and that if you have your boot partition too small you may not be able to do this trick. For example, my boot configuration: <BLOCKQUOTE> <PRE> <TT>isolde:/boot$ sudo du -s .</TT> <TT>Password:</TT> <TT>104649 .</TT> <TT>isolde:/boot$ sudo du -s _darcs</TT> <TT>69904 _darcs</TT> </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> As you can see, _darcs is occupying a pretty big chunk of my /boot partition's data, but given that I'm messing around with kernels and kernel patches, it's worth it to me. <TABLE CELLSPACING="0" CELLPADDING="0" WIDTH="100%"> <TR> <TD> -- Michael T. Richter Email: ttmrichter@gmail.com, mtr1966@hotpop.com MSN: ttmrichter@hotmail.com, mtr1966@hotmail.com; YIM: michael_richter_1966; AIM: YanJiahua1966; ICQ: 241960658; Jabber: mtr1966@jabber.cn "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot [...]. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." --Mother Theresa </TD> </TR> </TABLE> </BODY> </HTML>