[NCLUG] I just did a system update

[Stephen Warren]

On 10/15/2012 12:25 PM, Jesse Griffin wrote:
> Kerry,
> 
> I'm still not entirely clear what you are after, but here are some ideas.
> 
> To see all the packages installed on your system run:
> 
> dpkg -l >pkgslist
>    or
> rpm -qa >pkgslist
> 
> Then, if you reinstall your OS, you could use those lists to rebuild the 
> packages that you want.
> 
> Alternately, if you are looking for a full system backup, capable of being used 
> as a full restore to a new machine or a blank disk you might want to consider 
> http://clonezilla.org/.

A simple way might be to just hook up a second hard-drive of the same
size, boot a live CD, and:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

(NOTE: Be very careful to validate the device-names in the command above
so that you are actually copying from the currently installed system
disk to the backup, not the other way around or copying to/from some
other random disk or CD-ROM)

Then, restore is simply a matter of removing the broken drive and
hooking up the backup hard-drive. Of course, you either need to do the
above copy regularly, or have some other more frequent method of backing
up your data; the above method is most useful when you don't want to
screw around re-creating partition layouts, installing boot-loaders,
etc. for disaster recovery.