I am working on a script that will compare the filesystem on your running Tiny Core system against the tinycore.gz (or microcore.gz) initrd file. It will show you the following:
-Files that only appear in the initrd and not the running system
-Files that only appear in the running filesystem and not the initrd
-Files that appear both places but have different contents
-Files that are identical in your running system and initrd and are included in your backup (you might want to consider excluding these files from backup) - As suggested by tinypoodle
In addition to just listing the files out, it will highlight in green the files that are in your mydata.tgz backup.
I think this will be useful for the following reasons:
-You can easily run this to see what is possibly missing from your backup before you reboot. For example, if you run the "adduser" command to add a user, you can run this script and it will show you that the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow have different contents in the running system verses the initrd, and if they are not green in the list that means they are not included in your backup and these changes will be lost upon reboot. If they are green, then you know they will be included in your backup.
-If you upgrade to a new version of Tiny Core, you can run the script to easily see what files have changed between your backup and the new version of Tiny Core.
-You can see if you have files being backed up that don't need to be included in your backup because they are identical to what is in the initrd.
The script is attached to this post (you must be logged in to the forum to download). It will run in Tiny Core Base with no additional extensions required. The script is a proof of concept and could use some work. If you find this useful let me know and I will continue to work on it.
Thanks,
Brian