Recovery modes depend on what you're trying to recover, and what\r\nyou've got to work with.

If you've toasted /var, you've got a lot cut out for you. There's\r\npartial system recovery possible, and I've been working with Osamu Aoki\r\n(a Debian developer) at scripting a recovery procedure based on [link|http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0113.petreley.html|Nick Petreley's\r\narticle on the subject]. Unfortunately, the current status is that\r\ndebconf remains hosed.

It may be cleaner at this point to reinstall if you've wiped out\r\nsufficiently large portions of the system. You're likely going to have\r\ninconsistencies even if you do get most of the apt database rebuilt,\r\nthough these may not be major. It is possible to get a pretty\r\ngood conformance between files actually installed on the system and\r\nDebian packages by way of such utilities as apt-file.

Best bet is redundant off-site backups. Any locally managed\r\npartitions, /etc, and large portions of /var are necessary to recover a\r\nsystem from hardware or operator failure.