What needs to be backed up?

[Dolphin Developer]

Here's a newbie question... what, if anything, gets backed up with regard to Cydia installed apps when I sync my iPhone? Specifically, I am taking a long time to modify the menus of the terminal app. I don't want to have to redo this if I have to restore from scratch.

I've seen a reference to an app that saves the deb packages you have installed, so I assume that the sync doesn't cover that out of the box. Is that all I need, or do I need to also somehow archive certain directories?

Oh and thank you for having such an awesome community here! I would never have bought an iPhone if I didn't know I could hack it & make it do what I want it to...

[TooSlo]

Backup Cydia Applications Using AptBackup & AppStore Using iTunes before Upgrade iPhone School’s Weblog

That should be exactly what you're looking for. I haven't tried it just yet (haven't had to do a major restore just yet) but it looks like exactly what you would use.

[Dolphin Developer]

Thanks for your response. Actually this is what I had seen before. At any rate, I just tested it, and I can confirm it works: The combination of first running AptBackup, then doing a backup with iTunes seems to save everything, including configuration and data of packages installed using Cydia. After starting from scratch (recovery mode with itunes) and restoring personal data, I jailbreaked and installed AptBackup, then performed a restore within AptBackup. I ended up with a system that seems identical to my original one, except for the very minor item that a couple apps were on the wrong home page. Specifically, it successfully restored a configuration change I had made to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and my custom menu options in terminal. Very cool!

Update on my restore test: FYI, for anyone interested one thing that didn't get backed up was sudoers file for the sudo package.