Finally, while using a distribution and over the months/years I use it, I try to log - in words - significant changes to it in an "administrator's journal" (like a Captain's log in Star Trek if you will :-P ). I put it in /var/log/admin-journal . I always back that up, especially since, on the new system, I often follow steps I had logged there (e.g. "2019-01-05\nSet up a wheel group to be able to su without password, via /etc/passed and /etc/pam.d/su ; placed alice and bob in the wheel group")

Dutch_Master wrote:

Investigate the use of the apt options --get-selections and --set-selections in the apt man page
Btw, do NOT use dd to backup your disk to an existing backup drive. Unless you don't care about the data that's already on it :-\

What I meant is something like

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/backup/sda-backup.dd

with the USB disk mounted at /media/backup. So my dd backup would just be a ~30 GB file on that disk (among other back-uped things).

Thanks for the get/set selection examples!

Gregor

Just backup what you need... separately. Because you may end up in a loop when dd gets up to /media and starts backing itself up.

dd is a good copy-disk, but rsync can do directories and to make it a bit easier (faster/smaller) use rsync instead of dd.

rsync -avh /usr/local /media/backup/sda-backup/usr/
rsync -avh /home /media/backup/sda-backup/

my two cents worth. :-) All the best!

Gregor

I'm not sure it'll work as you want, so proceed at own risk!

Investigate the use of the apt options --get-selections and --set-selections in the apt man page
Btw, do NOT use dd to backup your disk to an existing backup drive. Unless you don't care about the data that's already on it :-\

What I meant is something like

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/backup/sda-backup.dd

with the USB disk mounted at /media/backup. So my dd backup would just be a ~30 GB file on that disk (among other back-uped things).

Thanks for the get/set selection examples!

Gregor

man apt
apt --get-selections > selection.txt
apt --set-selections < selection.txt

Btw, do NOT use dd to backup your disk to an existing backup drive. Unless you don't care about the data that's already on it :-\

Since Devuan looks very promising to me, I want to give it some kind of "harder try". Which means: I want to keep my home and some minor /usr/local things. Everything else I want to be fresh like morning dew. So what I'm thinking of is ...

- dd-Backup of my system disk (just about 30 GB SSD) to an external backup-disk (a 4 TB USB disk which I use for my weekly backups.
- export a list of currently installed programs
- make a fresh base installation of Devuan
- do some apt magic to install the programs (use the list created in step 2)

So, what do you think? Am I missing something? What would be the fitting commands for the steps 2 and 4?

At least, if anything goes terribly wrong, I could dd the backup back ...

TIA

Gregor