I try putting etc/network/interfaces, etc into opt/.file_something but it will not persist.

When try backup/restore says too large files or so and won't work. Can someone step me through it?

What are you trying to do?
Do you copy those files into /opt/.file_something
How are you doing this, which commands do you use?

I've just started using dsl on a VirtualBox software computer. Thinking of using it on old computers for a network.

It says that if you want your setup to persist through boots you should put the names of the files you want to persist in the file /opt/.file.<something can't remember: not on this box at the moment>.

I do this, with say networking files or custom fstab (an odd feature of the file is that there is no leading / to the paths in the filenames)

When I try to log out by double clicking the close down icon it asks me to use backup/save in the control centre thing this asks for the device to save stuff to. I answer: sda8 or whatever. It say error. Look in some file. Said file does not exist. I create it, repeat proceedure - nothing in file.

I try to start dsl with boot: dsl backup sda8 or whatever is the correct syntax. It say device not found or similar.

Point is how do I get my custom setup to persist the next time I boot. Perhaps the DSL.vdi virtualbox virtual disk is the problem?? The dsl CD won't work on the Debian Lenny box itself, it cannot deal with the CDROM drive, suspect this is a bug in Lenny since CD problems have been a feature of it from experimental stage.

Great thanks.

I had the same problem at first with the same error message 'blah blah' file does not exist. I had to create another partition on the usb, after that it was so easy and everything worked fine. After creating the partition I just went to the backup/restore typed 'sda5' which was the empty partition that I'd created and hit backup. It just worked I didn't have to create any files or anything like that, the box just dissapered, so I checked to see if it worked by pressing ctrl+alt del which took me out of x to a command line where there's a log, which showed it had been succeful. To get back into x I just typed startx. When next booting all my settings just loaded, it finds the file for you, but I'm having to point my floppy drive to the usb port because of bios limitations. I'm not sure how this affects things?

This was on a two gig stick, I only had dsl on there and it refused to backup there until I made that paritition, so I guess it doesn't like being saved with its other files.

Put a 60MB partition on the virtual hard disk and 'parsimonious' installed dsl, it wasn't parsimonious but similar. Now it works like you say. But it did mess me about the last time I used it, so hope for the best.

Thanks.