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I have spend more than 2 months configuring my openSUSE 12.1 linux as ultimate development environment with manual installs of many tools and packages. How could I pack this as my own distro on a DVD that I could any time use for backup?
azec-pdx
Posted 2012-07-18T18:11:30.180
Reputation: 111
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I would not recommend backing up on DVD. DVDs are very sensitive and have a short live when not stored carefully. I would recommend hard drives for system backups.
Re-writable media has the advantage that you can keep your backup up-to-date effortlessly. There are zillions of backup tools available to automate this task. (I prefer rsnapshot.)
Marco
Posted 2012-07-18T18:11:30.180
Reputation: 4 015
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Try susestudio.com
You can create your own cloud virtual machine, then when you're finished adding your packages, download your image, share it with others, etc. etc. This way, you have a copy on hand if something goes wrong, and a copy online that you can use virtually, anywhere.
Hank Gettinger
Posted 2012-07-18T18:11:30.180
Reputation: 46
I have tried creating own cloud instance earlier on Suse Studio. However I never realized how can I install my own packages (licensed software that I payed for) on these machines. Is it possible? – azec-pdx – 2012-07-19T05:56:51.757
susestudio is definitely nice, but not helpful in my case, as I already have configured system, and don't want to spend days sitting and configuring same image on susestudio – azec-pdx – 2012-07-19T07:55:57.800
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I realize that this doesn't EXACTLY answer your question, but you can always make an image of your installation with Clonezilla (which is very similar to Norton Ghost). Since Clonezilla is a live boot disk that takes very little space, your image could potentially fit on the same live DVD to pull from. Sounds good in theory anyway.
Chad Harrison
Posted 2012-07-18T18:11:30.180
Reputation: 5 759
I read about Clonezilla, and thought it might be nice to try. I tried download and realized that entire site fails. Wonder if the project is still maintained. Not very helpful. – azec-pdx – 2012-07-25T05:14:35.763
Oh wow, it was just last year that I was fully using Clonezilla for such a situation. I'll Get back with something updated. – Chad Harrison – 2012-07-25T12:29:57.547
So, I was able to download clonezilla-live-1.2.12-67-i486.iso. Short of burning the image, what do you mean by "that entire site fails"? – Chad Harrison – 2012-07-25T12:57:19.540
I was not able to download ISO at all. When I clicked download on the left side it brings me back to the usage guide again. Let me try again... – azec-pdx – 2012-07-25T13:07:06.110
Try this link - http://clonezilla.org/downloads/stable/iso-zip-files.php
– Chad Harrison – 2012-07-25T13:15:46.133
I ended up using linux tool called "dd" to backup entire disk as image. It is very convenient and behaves similar to Norton Ghost. After creating image I used bz2 compression to compact image. One important thing with this tool is that one needs to unmount disks that are being backed up. Some LIVE CD linux distro (like Knoppix) comes handy to this task. – azec-pdx – 2012-07-19T07:54:36.057