[Discuss] Moving Your Everyday System to New Hardware

[Bill Bogstad]

On Wed, Aug 28, 2024 at 12:43 PM Daniel Barrett
<dbarrett at blazemonger.com> wrote:

> I do something similar but slightly more automated. I use git to
> capture every change I make to system files. Basically, I initialize a
> git repository in (say) ~/SystemChanges and create a duplicate, sparse
> directory structure containing all the changed files. So if I update
> /etc/apache2/foo.config, I copy it to ~/SystemChanges/etc/apache2/foo.config
> and "git commit." When it comes time to migrate to a new machine, I can
> recreate all needed changes to system files within a few hours. I also reap
> the benefits of versioned changes to individual system files.
>
> The only tricky bit is preserving file owners & permissions, but they
> are present in the original files.
 [late to the party]

It sounds like you are doing something like the etckeeper system:

https://etckeeper.branchable.com/

It handles things like file permissions pretty well.   One downside is
that as far as I know it only handles files in /etc.
It would be nice to use it more generically to manage configuration
files on other directories.

-- 
Bill Bogstad
bogstad at pobox.com