2009/2/28 Callum Lerwick <seg(a)haxxed.com>:
On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 17:55 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >From doing some Googling, it seems Ubuntu have come up with an
> alternative approach, which is for the installer not to wipe out /home
> on an existing install...
>
>
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-May/004210.html
You'd also need to not wipe out user accounts. But this seems like a
worthwhile feature. Windows can do something like it. (There you just
have to wipe out c:\windows...)
And now we start bikeshedding about implementation. Do we
whitelist /home and /etc/passwd|group and wipe out everything else, or
do we nuke a whitelist of known system directories? The latter is
probably safer. You probably want to save /usr/local too. What if users
have crap in /var/www/, or MySQL databases...
Or even safer -- the OS X "Archive and Install" approach, where this
whitelist is moved into, e.g. /previous
There's a problem with lack of space, of course, and that /var in
particular might be on a separate partition. So maybe for each
whitelist entry that is mounted on its own partition, recursively do
the backup, so if we are saving /var/foo and /var/bar, they end up in
/var/previous/foo and /var/previous/bar if /var is mounted separately.
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