Ubuntu

Back Up

Asked by chintalvaady

 I hv decided to reinstall ubuntu .This time i will go with the recent version (8.10).this time i dont want to just update the O.s because ,i had not assigned swap space during the installation process,which has effected in the computer being slow.so i wnt to install the O.s frm the scratch.the problem is that,i hv installed many softwares like sun java,eclipse,i dont want to dowload it again and install with the new O.s..can anyone help me to back up the installed applications in a different location ...so that i can use to install it back in the recent version of ubuntu.

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Caesar
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Best Caesar (shcaesar) said : 		#1

For some software, it's possible to port all their programs to another machine or back up.
But for others, what you can do is back up their configuration files, then go to another machine and import those configuration files to corresponding software.
Thus, I think, it's hard to figure out a perfect method for your problem.

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Wyatt Smith (wyatt-smith) said : 		#2

This works very well for performing a clean reinstallation of the same OS. You might find some of this helpful.
(Please run all command in a terminal from your Home directory)

The basically procedure consists of:

Create list of installed packages
sudo dpkg --get-selections > installedpackages.log

Backup sources.list
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list .

Next backup your Home folder by any standard method and then reinstall the OS. After reinstallation, restore your Home folder.

Restore all your repositories.
If you are changing versions of Ubuntu you should manually edit your sources.list file to ensure ensure you are using the proper repositories, you can use your backup copy in home as a guide.

If you are using the same version of Ubuntu you can simple copy it from home with
sudo cp sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list

Set the list of packages to be restored
sudo dpkg --set-selections < installedpackages.log

Install dselect and and restore all packages
sudo apt-get install dselect
sudo dselect

It will take some time to download and reinstall all your packages, but this should ensure that you will have a clean install with all your previous packages.

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chintalvaady (cmraghavendran) said : 		#3

Thanks Caesar, that solved my question.