From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Jun 13 23:38:12 2012
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Subject: Re: Lost /var/db/pkg
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On Wed, 13 Jun 2012 19:17:20 +0000 (UTC)
jb wrote:

> William Orr <will <at> worrbase.com> writes:
> 
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I had a hard disk failure some time ago, and I ended up losing
> > /var/db/pkg/ and everything under it (before you say I should've
> > been backing it up, I know, I was actually doing an initial full
> > when this happened). Is there a way I can restore it, or at least
> > manually add entries I know for sure about?
> 
> forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=6466
> "The application themselves are still installed and will keep
> functioning, you just removed the records of their installation. When
> you later install newer versions, you may have to use a force flag to
> overwrite files (the port thinks it is uninstalled after all). The
> new port installations will get recorded in /var/db/pkg again.'

I wouldn't do that, it's not as simple as that post suggests. It's
likely to lead to a lot of files being orphaned, which may lead to
build or runtime errors in the future, or vulnerabilities  that
portaudit can't detect.