de/activate and Time Machine

Brandon Allbery allbery.b at gmail.com
Tue Apr 26 06:28:09 PDT 2016


On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 7:19 AM, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there a good way to exclude most of MacPorts from being backed up while
> retaining the possibility to reinstall without rebuilding? I'm thinking of
> backing up selected bits from var/macports (notably the registry and
> software directory), probably etc/macports and libexec/macports. There's
> however the issue of user config files; are there designated locations to
> install such files?
> I have already excluded var/macports/{build,log}.
>

I back up /opt/local/etc for config files; otherwise, software/ is good to
keep archives.

The registry's a bit of a risk, since it will be logically inconsistent if
you aren't backing up the whole install. If I needed to worry about this,
I'd look to dump out just the registry parts relating to archives and write
that to somewhere that is backed up. This could be tricky, as you might
well need to munge entries relating to activated packages so they look like
inactive ones. You'd also want a simple record of what packages were
activated at the time, so the system could be reconstituted from the
inactive dump and then running port activate over the active list. (Come to
think of it. this means backing up /opt/local/etc separately so config
files don't possibly get overwritten. Yes, that would indicate Portfile
bugs, but an emergency restore is the wrong time to discover and try to
deal with those bugs.)

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20160426/6136ce9c/attachment.html>


More information about the macports-users mailing list