The various modes of persistance still confuse me some, and I'm not necessarily sure which mode I'm operating in. I didn't use any special boot codes that I know of (how do I determine what boot codes I'm using?), but I installed it to a harddrive (in VirtualPC). The files that I want to persist have been added to .filetool.lst . When I add extensions, I tend to click "Install", which puts them into /hda1/tce/optional and /hda/tce/onboot.lst .
Now if I create new files that I want to keep, (or as in my dselect example, tons of files get splattered shotgun style into the filesystem), I have no idea exactly what files exist that I might want to backup. Ideally there would be some script I could run that would list every file that I've changes since I booted up.
The best idea I have right now for how to do this is to use the timestamps listed in "ls -la" to determine which were created at some time other than the boot time (which most kernel files share).
Ideas anyone?