Debian upgrade rollback

[Darryl Moore]

Hi TLUGers,

I know a few of you are fairly familiar with rsnapshot. I've received
some good answers from you before.

I am wanting to use rsnapshot to manage package upgrades under Ubuntu.
With Debian packages there is no easy way to roll back an upgrade if it
somehow breaks the system.

If I can use rsnapshot to backup all the system files and the apt
database, then if an upgrade goes bad I should be able to easily restore
the system and fix it.

Has anybody done this before?

I have configured rsnapshot.conf with the following backup directories:


#####################
#
#  System backups
#
backup  /boot   localhost/
backup  /usr    localhost/
backup  /etc    localhost/
backup  /lib    localhost/
backup  /bin    localhost/
backup  /sbin   localhost/
backup  /opt    localhost/
backup  /var/lib/apt    localhost/
backup  /var/lib/aptitude       localhost/

Does anyone see anything wrong with this setup?

There is very little information on restoring from a backup. Ideally, I
would run the backup immediately prior to the upgrade. If I need to
rewind it, I would like to simply copy back the files that were
changed,and remove any additional files that were added. Is there an
easy way to do this or do I need to write my own script to compare the
original files with the backups? rsnapshot-diff is great for comparing
between different backups, but I have seen nothing that checks any of
the backups against the originals.


Thanks,
Darryl

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