Making a backup of my Debian Install....?

[Blue-Vision]

I've finally gotten that Debian Sarge installation of mine working great, with ONE exception -- nVidia drivers. I'm not really worried about that one just yet, though...

What I AM interested in doing NOW is making a backup of the install, so that I don't have to download everything (or configure it, but that's optional since I know HOW to do it now).

Is there a way to either ghost the installation, or backup everything to my storage drive? Like I said, I'd prefer to ghost it, but a package backup would be fine too. Which folder contains all the packages that I've downloaded thru apt and synaptic? What procedures do I need to do to make it happen (for ghosting). Anything ELSE that I should be aware of, like how to restore it (etc, etc...).

Thanks for any help the community can provide. :)

[ichi]

Compress your whole / (root) directory in a tar.gz file.

If you need to restore afterwards, just extract the tar.gz backup to /.

You will only have problems if partion names change between making the backup and restoring, but that would be quite simple to solve anyway (just fix /etc/fstab and maybe reinstall grub/lilo).

[msg43]

Compress your whole / (root) directory in a tar.gz file.

If you need to restore afterwards, just extract the tar.gz backup to /.

You will only have problems if partion names change between making the backup and restoring, but that would be quite simple to solve anyway (just fix /etc/fstab and maybe reinstall grub/lilo).

585803704[/snapback]

And you can use any bootable cd to extract the tar.gz to / right

would HD format matter?

Sorry BetaguyGZT I was also curious

[Blue-Vision]

Cool. Thanks for the tip. That's easy enough to do....I shoulda thought of that.

:D

[ichi]

Yes, you can use a livecd to extract it.

I would keep the same filesystem just in case, but it should work anyway as long as the new filesystem is supported by the kernel.

[pixil9]

Next time you're running sarge you might wanna look at.......................

http://home.comcast.net/~andrex/Debian-nVi...stallation.html

I'd go with installation step #2 module-assistant.