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I usually keep a system backup on an old box just in case. I recently migrated to arch and decided to redo the backup, so i made a basic install of arch on the old box, then
rsync -av / old_box:/ --exclude-from=my_exclude_list* --delete
as i usually do. Everything went fine, except that running pacman -Syu on the old box after the sync produced a huge list of pending upgrades. That was puzzling because the pkg cache (isn't that where pacman looks to compare installed vs available ?) must have been copied along with everything else and the main box is up to date. I did pacman -Syu anyway and it downloaded everything, but refused to install saying the packages already existed on the system, which is hardly surprising as it had just been synced. So if the packages already existed, why on earth did pacman dowload them all over again ?
*/music
/etc/fstab
/boot/grub
/home/michael/.VirtualBox
/home/michael/.mldonkey
/home/michael/deluge*
/home/michael/qBT_dir
/mnt
/media
/etc/rc.conf
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
edit : I must have overlooked something, i reinstalled arch on the old box, rsync-ed everything into it from the main box, (with some additions to the exclude file i had forgotten, namely /proc ,/dev/ , /etc/hosts.* and /etc/rc.local) and now pacman -Syu works just fine, fetching only what's new and without complaining. Rsync is a much better backup tool by the way, because you can select what you want transferred. If i had been using partimage, the system would have a lot of wrong confs for the old machine.
Last edited by michaelks (2009-02-15 22:35:48)
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